Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish Culture

by David G. Roskies

Overview

This text documents a virtually unknown chapter in the history of the refusal of Jews throughout the ages to surrender. The author employs wide-ranging scholarship to the Holocaust and the memories associated with it, in affirmation of both continuities and violent endings.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780815606154
Publisher:	Syracuse University Press
Publication date:	12/01/1999
Series:	Judaic Traditions in Literature, Music and Art Ser.
Pages:	388
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

David G. Roskies is the Sol and Evelyn Henkind Chair in Yiddish Literature at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America.

Table of Contents

1	Ruined Cities of the Mind	1
2	The Liturgy of Destruction	15
3	Broken Tablets and Flying Letters	53
4	The Pogrom as Poem	79
5	The Rape of the Shtetl	109
6	The Self under Siege	133
7	Laughing Off the Trauma of History	163
8	Scribes of the Ghetto	196
9	The Burden of Memory	225
10	Jews on the Cross	258
	Notes	313
	Primary Sources Cited	351
	Index	362

Editorial Reviews

Roskies's work, densely argued, richly allusive, exemplary in its far-ranging scholarship, is itself a deeply felt response to the Holocaust and its memories; an affirmation of continuities as well as violent endings.

Times Literary Supplement

Eloquent and moving . . . Against the Apocalypse documents a virtually unknown chapter in the history of the refusal of Jews throughout the ages to surrender.

New York Times Book Review

[A] profound, subtle, and deeply moving book.

Boston Globe

Focusing on art as resistance to anti-Semitic violence and as a way to rethink the past, Roskies (Jewish literature, Jewish Theological Seminary, New York City) analyzes the creative responses of "scribes of the ghetto" and other East European Jewish intellectuals in the 19th and 20th centuries. Originally published by Harvard U. Press. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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