Testimony : Contemporary Writers Make the Holocaust Personal

Random House (Times) 1989. 1989. Hardcover. 8vo hardcover 511pp. very good / very good d/w. From Publisher's Weekly - Publishers WeeklynIn this sequel to Congregation: Contemporary Writers Read the Jewish Bible , Rosenberg asks 26 notables when they first learned of the Holocaust, how it shaped their careers and other questions. In a keen essay, Phillip Lopate censures what he sees as the Jewish preoccupation with the Holocaust to the exclusion of other human and even other Jewish disasters. Lore Segal fled Austria and lived with five different English families in eight years; the Holocaust drew black American Julius Lester and German Susanne Schlotelburg to Judaism. Unfortunately, many pieces are labored, fragmented and self-indulgent, banal or romanticized trivializations, with the nadir being Gordon Lish: ``Yes, I am being paid for this. Yes, I am glad I am being paid for this. No, I did not say that I did not want to be paid for this. No, I did not say go give instead what you are paying to me to somebody who really paid with his bones for this.'' First serial to Esquire, Tikkun and Partisan Review; Jewish Book Club selection. (Dec.)nnFrom Library JournalnRosenberg, who edited the recent Congregation: Contemporary Writers Read the Jewish Bible ( LJ 11/15/87), has now edited a new collection of essays by 27 contemporary Jewish writers on how the Holocaust affected their lives--emotionally and intellectually--and how they came to terms with it. Contributors include Herbert Gold, Alfred Kazin, Anne Roiphe, Julius Lester, and Marge Piercy. The writing is consistently of a high level. This unusual anthology will be of value to anyone interested in Holocaust studies and Jewish literary life in America. For most collections.-- Robert A. Silver, Shaker Heights P.L., OhionnFrom Edith Milton - The New York Times Book Reviewn[This is] an artful patchwork of contrasting opinions and personalities.We may be invited to a few too many, and too banal, Pilgrims' Progresses to Jewish identity, but in the aggregate these essays transcend the obvious paradox at the heart of any anthology that offers to recollect genocide in tranquillity. One is given a small course in primary sources--Primo Levi, Paul Celan, Tadeusz Borowski--by some good and very varied instructors. And whatever shortcomings some of these essays display individually, they add up, finally, to auseful compendium of the difficult disagreements in contemporary Jewish thought. I should add, too, that several of these essays, in and of themselves, are very good indeed, a handful brilliant; and that even the worst take pains toavoid the conventional and the academic. .