Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust

New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1982. Reprint. Fifth printing. Hardcover. Very good in good dust jacket. Signed by author. Nice inscription on half-title. DJ has some wear and soiling.. Sewn binding. Cloth over boards. xxxii, 266, [6] p. Illustrations, black & white. Glossary. Notes. Geographic Index. Name Index. 89 original Hasidic tales-the first new Hasidic tales in over a century-collected by the author, from survivors of the Holocaust. They provide unique witness to the victims' inner experience of "unspeakable" suffering From Wikipedia: "Yaffa Eliach (b. Yaffa Sonenson, 31 May 1937) is a historian, author, and scholar of Judaic Studies and the Holocaust. She is probably best known for creating the Tower of Life made up by 1, 500 photographs for permanent display at the US Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. Yaffa Eliach was born Yaffa Sonenson to a Jewish family in Eishyshok near Vilna, now Eisiskes, Lithuania, a small town inhabited roughly in equal numbers by Jews and Poles until the Holocaust, where she lived until she was four years old. When the town was occupied by the Germans in June 1941 and most of the Jewish population was murdered by the Germans and Lithuanians, she and her family hid and survived in hiding places in the Eishyshok vicinity. Upon returning to Eishyshok after the arrival of the soviet forces in 1944, her mother and a brother were killed when the village, now occupied by the soviet army and security services (NKVD) was attacked by the Polish Home Army (AK) attempting to liberate Polish soldiers arrested by the soviet occupying forces. Eliach emigrated to Palestine in 1946, and later to the United States in 1954. She received her BA in 1967 and her MA in 1969 from Brooklyn College, New York and a Ph.D. in 1973 from City University of New York in Russian intellectual history, studying under Saul Lieberman and Salo Baron. Since 1969, Eliach was professor of history and literature in the Department of Judaic Studies at Brooklyn College, and founded and served as director of the Center for Holocaust Studies in Brooklyn. She was a member of President Jimmy Carter's Commission on the Holocaust in 1978-79 and accompanied his fact-finding mission to Eastern Europe in 1979. She has been a frequent lecturer at numerous conferences and educational venues and has appeared on television several times in documentaries and interviews. She has written several books and has contributed to Encyclopaedia Judaica, The Women's Studies Encyclopedia, and The Encyclopedia of Hasidism. Eliach has devoted herself to the preservation of memory of the Holocaust specifically from the perspective of a survivor's vantage point. She has also preserved her memories (via lecture) on video and audiocassettes. Her research has provided much material used in courses on the Holocaust in the United States. Eliach thinks her generation is the last link with the Holocaust, and considers it her responsibility to document the tragedy in terms of life, not death, bringing the Jews back to life. In memory of her native Eishyshok she has written Once There Was a World: A 900-Year Chronicle of the Shtetl of Eishyshok (1998), recounting the colorful Jewish life of Eishyshok. Also in memory of the town, Eliach created the Tower of Life, a permanent exhibit which contains approximately 1, 500 photos of Jews in Eishyshok before the arrival of the Germans for the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. Eliach is the author of Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust (Oxford University Press). Derived from interviews and oral histories, these eighty-nine original Hasidic tales about the Holocaust provide unprecedented witness, in a traditional idiom, to the victims' inner experience of "unspeakable" suffering. This volume constitutes the first collection of original Hasidic tales to be published in a century. According to Chaim Potok, Hasidic Tales is "An important work of scholarship and a sudden clear window onto the heretofore sealed world of the Hasidic reaction to the Holocaust. Its true stories and fanciful miracle tales are a profound and often poignant insight into the souls of those who suffered terribly at the hands of the Nazis and who managed somehow to use that very suffering as the raw material for their renewed livKkes." And, as Robert Lifton.