"Roskies has illuminated a path to further self-understanding of who Jews are and the type of bridges used to reach a usable past." ―Lifestyles Magazine
"[The author has] an exceptional gift for historical reconnection... The force of the shtetl, if not its romance, remains very much within him." ―Irving Louis Horowitz, Congress Monthly
"... fine new volume of essays... " ―David Singer, Commentary
"These studies, each a gem unto itself, together reveal how Jews cope with loss and catastrophe and illustrate that it is exactly by coping with loss and tragedy that Jews create a usable past and in, in the process, define their present and shape their future." ―Choice
After redrawing the map of modern Jewish memory, David G. Roskies takes the reader on a grand tour of major memory sites, each of which is built upon foundations of rebellion, rupture, and loss. Among them: chronicles of catastrophe from the Warsaw ghetto; a gallery of rabbis and zaddikim who are really rebels in disguise; a failed revolution recast into an Honor Row of magnificent tombstones; and a Holy Land where the search for a sacred space is led by those least likely ever to find it. The creativity with which Jews have coped with loss and catastrophe in modern times is richly revealed in this lively account.

The Jewish Search for a Usable Past (The Helen and Martin Schwartz Lectures in Jewish Studies)

Literature & Fiction

Roskies, David G.

History & Criticism

Indiana University Press

The Shtetl Book

Religion & Spirituality

Roskies, Diane K.

Judaism

Anti Defamation League of Bnai

A rich, sweeping memoir by David G. Roskies, Yiddishlands proceeds from the premise that Yiddish culture is spread out among many different people and geographic areas and transmitted through story, song, study, and the family. Roskies leads readers through Yiddishlands old and new by revisiting his personal and professional experiences and retelling his remarkable family saga in a series of lively, irreverent, and interwoven stories. Beginning with a flashback to his grandmother's storybook wedding in 1878, Yiddishlands brings to life the major debates, struggles, and triumphs of the modern Yiddish experience, and provides readers with memorable portraits of its great writers, cultural leaders, and educators. 
Roskies's story centers around Vilna, Lithuania, where his mother, Masha, was born in 1906 and where her mother, Fradl Matz, ran the legendary Matz Press, a publishing house that distributed prayer books, Bibles, and popular Yiddish literature. After falling in love with Vilna's cabaret culture, an older man, and finally a fellow student with elbow patches on his jacket, Masha and her young family are forced to flee Europe for Montreal, via Lisbon and New York. It is in Montreal that Roskies, Masha's youngest child, comes of age, entranced by the larger-than-life stories of his mother and the writers, artists, and performers of her social circle. Roskies recalls his own intellectual odyssey as a Yiddish scholar; his life in the original Havurah religious commune in Somerville, Massachusetts, in the 1970s; his struggle with the notion of aliyah while studying in Israel; his visit to Russia at the height of the Soviet Jewry movement; and his confrontation with his parents' memories in a bittersweet pilgrimage to Poland. Along the way, readers of Yiddishlands meet such prominent figures as Isaac Bashevis Singer, Melekh Ravitch, Itsik Manger, Avrom Sutzkever, Esther Markish, and Rachel Korn. 
With Yiddishlands, readers take a whirlwind tour of modern Yiddish culture, from its cabarets and literary salons to its fierce ideological rivalries and colorful personalities. Roskies's memoir will be essential reading for students of the recent Jewish past and of the living Yiddish present.

Yiddishlands: A Memoir (Non-series)

Biographies & Memoirs

Leaders & Notable People

Wayne State University Press

David G. Roskies is professor emeritus of Yiddish literature and culture at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. He cofounded Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2012. His prolific research and publications span the disciplines of Yiddish and Jewish literature, Holocaust literature, and Jewish cultural history.

Yiddishlands: A Memoir, Second Edition (Title Not in Series)

History

World

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.

Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish Culture (Judaic Traditions in Literature, Music, & Art (Paperback))

Syracuse University Press

Once, most of world Jewry was divided along The Gefilte Fish Line: cold and calculated Litvaks to the north, warm-blooded mystics to the south. Once, the majority of Jews lived in medieval market towns, surrounded by rivers, lakes, and forests. They were linked to each other through The Three K's: kahal (community), kley-koydesh (religious functionaries), and khevres (societies of common interest); linked to the gentile population through the marketplace; and linked to God through their institutions of learning and prayer. Once, they all spoke Yiddish. The Shtetl Book is their story, told through memoirs, legends, sayings, songs, games, maps, photos, facts and figures. This wonderful mishmash is now back in print, to delight a new generation of readers.

Shtetl Book

Ktav Pub & Distributors Inc

Once, most of world Jewry was divided along The Gefilte Fish Line: cold and calculated Litvaks to the north, warm-blooded mystics to the south. Once, the majority of Jews lived in medieval market towns, surrounded by rivers, lakes, and forests. They were linked to each other through The Three K's: kahal (community), kley-koydesh (religious functionaries), and khevres (societies of common interest); linked to the gentile population through the marketplace; and linked to God through their institutions of learning and prayer. Once, they all spoke Yiddish. The Shtetl Book is their story, told through memoirs, legends, sayings, songs, games, maps, photos, facts and figures. This wonderful mishmash is now back in print, to delight a new generation of readers.

Shtetl Book: An Introduction To East European Jewish Life And Lore: Augmented 30th Anniversary Edition

Europe

Holocaust Literature: A History and Guide (The Tauber Institute Series for the Study of European Jewry)

What is Holocaust literature? When does it begin and how is it changing? Is there an essential core that consists of diaries, eyewitness accounts of the concentration camps, and tales of individual survival? Is it the same everywhere: West and East, in Australia as in the Americas, in poetry as in prose? Is this literature sacred and separate, or can it be studied alongside other responses to catastrophe? What works of Holocaust literature will be read a hundred years from now―and why? Here, for the first time, is a historical survey of Holocaust literature in all genres, countries, and major languages. Beginning in wartime, it proceeds from the literature of mobilization and mourning in the Free World to the vast literature produced in Nazi-occupied ghettos, bunkers and places of hiding, transit and concentration camps. No less remarkable is the new memorial literature that begins to take shape within weeks and months of the liberation. Moving from Europe to Israel, the United States, and beyond, the authors situate the writings by real and proxy witnesses within three distinct postwar periods: “communal memory,” still internal and internecine; “provisional memory” in the 1960s and 1970s, when a self-conscious Holocaust genre is born; and “authorized memory,” in which we live today. Twenty book covers―first editions in their original languages―and a guide to the “first hundred books” show the multilingual scope, historical depth, and artistic range of this extraordinary body of writing.

Diamant, Naomi

Brandeis University Press

What is Holocaust literature? When does it begin and how is it changing? Is there an essential core that consists of diaries, eyewitness accounts of the concentration camps, and tales of individual survival? Is it the same everywhere: West and East, in Australia as in the Americas, in poetry as in prose? Is this literature sacred and separate, or can it be studied alongside other responses to catastrophe? What works of Holocaust literature will be read a hundred years from now―and why? Here, for the first time, is a historical survey of Holocaust literature in all genres, countries, and major languages. Beginning in wartime, it proceeds from the literature of mobilization and mourning in the Free World to the vast literature produced in Nazi-occupied ghettos, bunkers and places of hiding, transit and concentration camps. No less remarkable is the new memorial literature that begins to take shape within weeks and months of the liberation. Moving from Europe to Israel, the United States, and beyond, the authors situate the writings by real and proxy witnesses within three distinct postwar periods: “communal memory,” still internal and internecine; “provisional memory” in the 1960s and 1970s, when a self-conscious Holocaust genre is born; and “authorized memory,” in which we live today. Twenty book covers―first editions in their original languages―and a guide to the “first hundred books” show the multilingual scope, historical depth, and artistic range of this extraordinary body of writing.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Roskies, David G.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Roskies, David G.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Roskies, David G.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Jewish Search for a Usable Past (The Helen and Martin Schwartz Lectures in Jewish Studies)

The Shtetl Book

Yiddishlands: A Memoir (Non-series)

Yiddishlands: A Memoir, Second Edition (Title Not in Series)

Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish Culture (Judaic Traditions in Literature, Music, & Art (Paperback))

Shtetl Book

Shtetl Book: An Introduction To East European Jewish Life And Lore: Augmented 30th Anniversary Edition

Holocaust Literature: A History and Guide (The Tauber Institute Series for the Study of European Jewry)

Holocaust Literature: A History and Guide (The Tauber Institute Series for the Study of European Jewry)