Showcase Proustian Uncertainties

There are many things that didn't get done during the time I took off for mourning, I will start working on my best of list soon but I did want to get this out there for all to see and I know once you learn a bit about this book it will be high on your shelf like it is on mine. Proustian Uncertainties is a book where historian Saul Friedlander revisits Proust's In Search of Lost Time.
Enjoy!

ISBN-13:  978-1-59051-911-0
Publisher: Other Press
Release Date: 12-08-2020
Length: 176pp
Source: Publisher for Review (look for my review soon)
Buy It: Amazon/B&N/ IndieBound

ADD TO: GOODREADS

Overview:

A Pulitzer Prize–winning historian revisits Marcel Proust’s masterpiece in this essay on literature and memory, exploring the question of identity—that of the novel’s narrator and Proust’s own.

This engaging reexamination of In Search of Lost Time considers how the narrator defines himself, how this compares to what we know of Proust himself, and what the significance is of these various points of commonality and divergence. We know, for example, that the author did not hide his homosexuality, but the narrator did. Why the difference? We know that the narrator tried to marginalize his part-Jewish background. Does this reflect the author’s position, and how does the narrator handle what he tries, but does not manage, to dismiss? These are major questions raised by the text and reflected in the text, to which the author’s life doesn’t give obvious answers. The narrator’s reflections on time, on death, on memory, and on love are as many paths leading to the image of self that he projects.

In Proustian Uncertainties, Saul Friedländer draws on his personal experience from a life spent investigating the ties between history and memory to offer a fresh perspective on the seminal work.

Showcase Where Memory Leads My Life by Saul Friedlander translated by Helen R Lane

Today I'm showcasing a poignant piece of Holocaust literature, Where Memory Leads My Life by Saul Friedlander a sequel to his acclaimed first memoir, When Memory Comes, first published forty years ago and now also being re-released by Other Press. I have a copy of both books and I can't wait to read them.
Enjoy!

ISBN-13:
 978-1-63542-049-4

Publisher: Other Press


Release Date: 8-4-2020


Length:
 304pp

Buy It: Amazon/B&N/IndieBound

ADD TO: GOODREADS

Overview:

In this sequel to the classic work of Holocaust literature When Memory Comes, a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian returns to memoir to recount this tale of intellectual coming-of-age on three continents.

Forty years after his acclaimed, poignant first memoir, Friedländer returns with Where Memory Leads: My Life, bridging the gap between the ordeals of his childhood and his present-day towering reputation in the field of Holocaust studies. After abandoning his youthful conversion to Catholicism, he rediscovers his Jewish roots as a teenager and builds a new life in Israeli politics.

Friedländer’s initial loyalty to Israel turns into a lifelong fascination with Jewish life and history. He struggles to process the ubiquitous effects of European anti-Semitism while searching for a more measured approach to the Zionism that surrounds him. Friedländer goes on to spend his adulthood shuttling between Israel, Europe, and the United States, armed with his talent for language and an expansive intellect. His prestige inevitably throws him up against other intellectual heavyweights. In his early years in Israel, he rubs shoulders with the architects of the fledgling state and brilliant minds such as Gershom Sholem and Carlo Ginzburg, among others.

Most important, this memoir led Friedländer to reflect on the wrenching events that lead him to devote sixteen years of his life to writing his Pulitzer Prize–winning masterpiece, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945.