{"product_id":"where-memory-leads-isbn-9781635420494","title":"Where Memory Leads","description":"\u003cb\u003eIn this sequel to the classic work of Holocaust literature \u003ci\u003eWhen Memory Comes\u003c\/i\u003e, a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian returns to memoir to recount this tale of intellectual coming-of-age on three continents.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Forty years after his acclaimed, poignant first memoir, Friedländer returns with \u003ci\u003eWhere Memory Leads: My Life\u003c\/i\u003e, 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFriedländer’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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMost 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, \u003ci\u003eThe Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945\u003c\/i\u003e.“\u003ci\u003eWhere Memory Leads\u003c\/i\u003e is written in the key of history, a register that moves from meaning to message. Here, the author is crystal clear. ‘The only lesson one could draw from the Shoah was precisely the imperative: stand against injustice.’ Obligation fulfilled.” —\u003ci\u003eWall Street Journal\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Friedländer is an engaging writer and personality. This is an important book for readers interested in intellectual history and the history of Israel.” —\u003ci\u003eLibrary Journal\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A foremost Holocaust scholar carefully reflects on his harsh early years and lifelong academic mission in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Geneva, and Los Angeles…the book is haunting in scope and depth.” —\u003ci\u003eKirkus Reviews\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Friedländer's memoir, in its rigorous attention to the major and minor devastations that his life has wrought, will set you thinking about your own responses to the collective damage of history. And yet, for all the gravity of his reflections, Friedländer is never self-important, nor does his prose swell. Indeed, it’s a tribute to his consuming honesty and taste for understatement that the reader comes away with a sense of the complexity and hesitancy that marks a life that, in other hands, might have been presented as one long triumphal march.” —\u003ci\u003eBookForum\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e“This is an often poignant rendering of a life brimming with both fulfillment and unsatisfied longings.”\u003ci\u003e —Booklist \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Saul Friedlander’s memoir is a remarkable inquiry into the truths of a paradoxical identity.” \u003ci\u003e—Times Literary Supplement \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“This is a very moving memoir about the personal and psychological toll of the Holocaust.” \u003ci\u003e—New York Post \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“\u003ci\u003eWhere Memory Leads: My Life\u003c\/i\u003e is an incredibly sad and moving book. Friedländer has led a full, exciting and dramatic life and the story he tells, in a most forthright manner, is bound to touch most, if not all, of his readers...This work should be read by Jewish and non-Jewish students of history alike...it is an important contribution to Holocaust literature.” \u003ci\u003e—Association of Jewish Libraries\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“Orphans of the Shoah, Saul Friedländer became its most revered Historian. His survival in a Catholic seminary, his vocation for the priesthood, and his rediscovery of Jewish identity are the subjects of his classic \u003ci\u003eWhen Memory Comes\u003c\/i\u003e. This new book recalls with equal sensitivity the quests of his subsequent life. Never sure what ‘home’ he belonged, Friedländer spent years shuttling among universities in Switzerland, Israel, and California. Despite bouts of anxiety, he crossed intellectual swords with some of his generation’s most redoubtable personalities. His attachment to Israel matches in intensity only his rejections of some of its policies. There is never a dull page.” —Robert O. Paxton, Professor Emeritus at Columbia University\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A gripping, troubling narrative. The great historian of the Shoah talks about his life, about research and politics, about places (France, Israel, United States), and people. Page after page we feel we are getting closer to him. Then we suddenly realize how inscrutable an individual life is\u003ci\u003e—\u003c\/i\u003eto us, to the narrator himself” —Carlo Ginzburg, Professor Emeritus at UCLA and author of \u003ci\u003eThreads and Traces: True, False, Fictive\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Saul Friedländer is an engaging companion on this journey through the second half of the twentieth century. The people, situations, and events he encountered come vividly to life, though never far away are the memories of World War II that he pondered throughout his remarkable career.” —Theodore K. Rabb, Professor Emeritus of History at Princeton University\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “The most creative and innovative scholar of the Holocaust, Saul Friedländer has written far more than a memoir. A haunting sequel to \u003ci\u003eWhen Memory Comes\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eWhere Memory Leads\u003c\/i\u003e explores the very private and personal as well as scholarly and political sides of the author’s adult life. It shows Friedländer seemingly at home in many places and languages, but ultimately as a Jewish outsider everywhere. Fascinating reading for anyone interested in intellectual life in exile, Holocaust scholarship, and Jewish identity.” —Christopher R. Browning, Frank Porter Graham Professor of History Emeritus, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“In this engaging new memoir written forty years after his first one, Saul Friedländer examines the forces that propelled him from occupied France, where he spent World War II as a hidden Jewish child, into an active political life in Israel, which he managed to combine with a brilliant academic career in Europe and the United States. \u003ci\u003eWhere Memory Leads\u003c\/i\u003e is an engrossing backward glance enriched with startling anecdotes and tender, poetic evocations of Paris in the fifties and Jerusalem of yesteryear.” —Anka Muhlstein, author of \u003ci\u003eMonsieur Proust’s Library\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eBalzac’s Omelette\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003eSaul Friedländer\u003c\/b\u003e is an award-winning Israeli-American historian and currently a professor of history (emeritus) at UCLA. He was born in Prague to a family of German-speaking Jews, grew up in France, and lived in hiding during the German occupation of 1940–1944. His historical works have received great praise and recognition, including the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction for his book \u003ci\u003eThe Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003cb\u003ePrologue\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e How do you say “aubergines” in Hebrew? I’ve eaten hundreds, maybe thousands of aubergine dishes in my lifetime, particularly in Israel, and suddenly the word for it was gone. Strangely enough, the American English term surfaced immediately: eggplant. But never mind the English, it was the search for the Hebrew word that kept me awake. It was our last night in Paris. A few days earlier, in October 2012, we had celebrated my eightieth birthday. Tomorrow we’d be on our way back to L.A. At dinner we had a \u003ci\u003esalade\u003c\/i\u003e \u003ci\u003ed’aubergines \u003c\/i\u003ein a small restaurant close to the hotel and now, well past midnight, my wild chase continues. I notice that my wife has somehow half woken up. “What’s the salad we ate last night called in Hebrew?” In her half sleep, Orna manages to whisper, “\u003ci\u003eHatzilim\u003c\/i\u003e.” Of course, \u003ci\u003ehatzilim\u003c\/i\u003e! What a relief! Now I can finally fall asleep. Damn it! What was the English word that had come up so easily? Oh yes: eggplant. That’s probably how the Dutch felt when they drained off seawater and secured a further patch of land: a victory against nature! Starting a book of memoirs with an episode of memory loss may seem like a joke. It is not; it is a real situation that nonetheless can be dealt with, as I will explain at the end of this prologue. Thirty-eight years ago, I published \u003ci\u003eWhen Memory Comes\u003c\/i\u003e, a memoir about my childhood and adolescence, focusing on my early life in Prague, the war years in France, adolescence in Paris, and my departure for Israel in June 1948. Some short glimpses of later years were included, up to 1977. In these pages, I turn to events that I hardly mentioned, or, in most cases, did not mention at all, between my return as a student to Paris in 1953 and the year preceding the publication of the early memoir, 1977. Then the narration goes on to this day (2015). As this text frequently deals with my reactions to and, sometimes, my involvement in public events, I opted, for the sake of clarity, to keep to an essentially chronological narrative. It so happens that the main clusters of events that I shall evoke indeed followed each other; thus, the text tells of a sequence that took place in real time. First come the years of apprenticeship, in which I move from place to place, from country to country, in search of an identity and a calling. The second part deals with Israel, at the very outset, then from about 1967 — when I started teaching in Jerusalem — to the early 1980s and, less intensively so, in the subsequent years. Germany follows, from segments of my early life to this day, but mainly as I experienced it during the eighties. The fourth part turns to life in the United States. No life progresses along such neat divisions, and issues dominant during one stage may carry over to all that comes thereafter. In this memoir in particular, the main issues — possibly less so regarding the American experience — are interwoven throughout. In short, these divisions represent temporary accentuations of one central issue during a given period, accentuations that are often narrated within the context of the minute incidents of everyday life. This book shows the influence of the Shoah (the Holocaust) on my personal life and on my reactions to Israel, Germany, and ultimately America. And, as the narration progresses, it also increasingly centers on the writing and teaching of history, particularly the history of the Holocaust, the essential work of my life. Thus, the writing of that history and, in my case, the unavoidable relation of memory to history is a recurring theme in each of the succeeding parts, even the first one. Beyond this central theme, by dint of circumstances, I became deeply involved at times in places and issues that continue to attract intense general interest; they are presented here from a subjective perspective, but as openly and candidly as possible and from as detached a viewpoint as I can manage. I also intend to share with the reader my doubts, debates, and regrets about this or that attitude or decision and, finally, the false starts and the right intuitions inherent in the history-writing process. I started writing these reminiscences after my eighty-first birthday, under the constant threat of some loss of memory. At my age, though, long-term memory is present, usually with added clarity, while the short-term past fades away at times. I have kept written traces of some recent events and integrated them into the text; it helps, but, all in all, they are only a tiny part of it, mere ripples on the course of the later years.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003ePart 1\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e \u003ci\u003eChanging Places\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003eChapter One\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e Nirah\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “Dear Sir, when this letter reaches you, I will have left Paris for Palestine . . .” Thus began the letter I sent to my guardian, Isidore Rosemblat, in the early days of June 1948. \u003ci\u003eYou will probably be astonished, but don’t worry: I am with\u003c\/i\u003e \u003ci\u003ea group of Betarim [members of the right-wing Betar, the\u003c\/i\u003e \u003ci\u003eyouth movement linked to Menachem Begin’s semiclandestine\u003c\/i\u003e \u003ci\u003eIrgun], entirely safe. Mainly, don’t alert the police or any\u003c\/i\u003e \u003ci\u003eother organization of the kind; it would only create additional\u003c\/i\u003e \u003ci\u003eproblems and be of no help as, when you get this news, I will\u003c\/i\u003e \u003ci\u003ealready be on the ship.\u003c\/i\u003e \u003ci\u003eDon’t worry about what my uncles may say as, before you\u003c\/i\u003e \u003ci\u003eeven write to them, I shall be with them and I am sure that\u003c\/i\u003e \u003ci\u003ethey won’t be terribly displeased.\u003c\/i\u003e \u003ci\u003eLet us now turn to concrete matters: I took with me, in\u003c\/i\u003e \u003ci\u003emy backpack, all my linen as well as my gray suit, my beige\u003c\/i\u003e \u003ci\u003esuit, and the leather jacket. Before leaving, I carried the yellow\u003c\/i\u003e \u003ci\u003esuitcase, the briefcase, and the textbooks to a friend who\u003c\/i\u003e \u003ci\u003ewill return them to you as soon as possible.\u003c\/i\u003e \u003ci\u003eI must also ask you to send word to the lycée to inform\u003c\/i\u003e \u003ci\u003ethem that I am leaving the establishment and that I am not\u003c\/i\u003e \u003ci\u003epresenting myself for the baccalaureate [the first part of the\u003c\/i\u003e \u003ci\u003efinal high school exam, taken at the end of the eleventh\u003c\/i\u003e \u003ci\u003egrade]. Thus everything will be settled.\u003c\/i\u003e \u003ci\u003eI will send you a long letter as soon as I arrive; I would\u003c\/i\u003e \u003ci\u003ehave liked to say goodbye and thank you in person for all you\u003c\/i\u003e \u003ci\u003ehave done for me but I was worried about the possibility of\u003c\/i\u003e \u003ci\u003esome obstacle to my departure. In any case, don’t consider it\u003c\/i\u003e \u003ci\u003eas ingratitude on my part. While waiting to see you again in\u003c\/i\u003e \u003ci\u003ePalestine, I kiss you affectionately,\u003c\/i\u003e \u003ci\u003ePaul*\u003c\/i\u003e \u003ci\u003ePS (very important): Please do pay my third quarter boarding\u003c\/i\u003e \u003ci\u003eexpenses as, otherwise, they will not return 1 pair of sheets,\u003c\/i\u003e \u003ci\u003e2 shirts, 2 underpants, and 2 pairs of socks I left at the lycée.\u003c\/i\u003e On June 5, two days after I had written that letter, the principal of the Paris Lycee Henri IV (where I was a boarder) wrote to my guardian: \u003ci\u003eSir,\u003c\/i\u003e \u003ci\u003eI regret to inform you that young Friedländer, a boarder\u003c\/i\u003e \u003ci\u003estudent in First A [eleventh grade, classic] surreptitiously\u003c\/i\u003e \u003ci\u003eleft the lycée yesterday at 4:30 p.m., using the exit of the day\u003c\/i\u003e \u003ci\u003estudents. According to our investigation he intends to join the\u003c\/i\u003e \u003ci\u003eJewish forces in Palestine.\u003c\/i\u003e \u003ci\u003ePlease excuse my reminding you on the same occasion that\u003c\/i\u003e \u003ci\u003ethe April–June quarter has not been paid. Please accept . . .\u003c\/i\u003e \u003ci\u003eP. Camenen, Principal\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e News travels fast.","brand":"Other Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46302283497701,"sku":"NP9781635420494","price":16.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781635420494.jpg?v=1767744046","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/where-memory-leads-isbn-9781635420494","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}