Calendars map time, shaping and delineating our experience of it. While the challenges to tracking Jewish conceptions of time during the Holocaust were substantial, Alan Rosen reveals that many took great risks to mark time within that vast upheaval. Rosen inventories and organizes Jewish calendars according to the wartime settings in which they were produced-from Jewish communities to ghettos and concentration camps. The calendars he considers reorient views of Jewish circumstances during the war and show how Jews were committed to fashioning traditional guides to daily life, even in the most extreme conditions. In a separate chapter, moreover, he elucidates how Holocaust-era diaries sometimes served as surrogate Jewish calendars. All in all, Rosen presents a revised idea of time, continuity, the sacred and the mundane, the ordinary and the extraordinary even when death and destruction were the order of the day. Rosen's focus on the Jewish calendar-the ultimate symbol of continuity, as weekday follows weekday and Sabbath follows Sabbath-sheds new light on how Jews maintained connections to their way of conceiving time even within the cauldron of the Holocaust.

About the Author

Alan Rosen is author of The Wonder of Their Voices: The 1946 Holocaust Interviews of David Boder, editor of Literature of the Holocaust, and editor (with Steven T. Katz) of Elie Wiesel: Jewish, Literary, and Moral Perspectives. He lectures regularly at the International School for Holocaust Studies at Yad Vashem and other Holocaust study centers.

Reviews

In addition to the richness of the calendrical artifacts surveyed, Rosen provides an evidence based argument against the erasure of Jewish time. Applying a fresh integration of historiography and hermeneutics, he forges a path that leads beyond Holocaust time by delving into its devestating details.

* the Lehrhaus *

The Holocaust's Jewish Calendars offers a major contribution to the understanding of the life Jews had to experience not only as human beings cast into dreadful circumstances, but most sensibly as people trying to survive under inhuman situations, chiefly designed to eradicate their own Jewishness. [Rosen's] book is a major opus to add to the library of any reader.

-- Sylvie Anne Goldberg, Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales, Paris * Slavic Review *

Rosen's important and very readable study raises and answers an array of significant questions concerning the concept and meaning of Jewish time as well as the value of a calendar's insistence on normalcy, regularity, and order during the hellishly disordered time of the Shoah.

* the arts fuse *

Rosen's work is the most comprehensive to date treatment of these precious artifacts of the Holocaust's Jewish efforts to maintain religious observations and identity and should serve scholars and lay people interested in accessing this aspect of Jewish martyrology.

* Choice *

The Holocaust's Jewish Calendars is a masterpiece that helps us grasp one of the most fundamental traditional modes of spiritual resistance-the tracking of Jewish time in the ghettos, camps and in hiding.

* Jewish Action *

The book offers a comprehensive overview as well as a detailed insight into everyday Jewish life during the Holocaust as well as into the techniques of survival and the preservation of one's own Jewish identity through the special access to the Jewish time. Rosen illustrates how the victims opposed the destruction of Jewish life when they wrote the Jewish calendar, and thus makes a fundamental contribution to it.

-- Christin Zuhlke * H-Soz-Kult *

The Holocaust's Jewish Calendars is deeply researched, eloquently written, and filled with surprises. Rosen has unearthed a treasure trove of calendrical works, mute survivors to historical calamity. He analyzes each artifact in terms of its materiality, its creator, its calendrical calculations, and its Holocaust setting. By means of the calendars, Rosen explores philosophically the meaning of tracking time under such extreme conditions. The Holocaust's Jewish Calendars is an original and profound contribution to the study of Jewish culture during the Holocaust.

-- Elisheva Carlebach * Journal of Modern History *


Awards
Winner of The Yad Vashem International Book Prize 2020 (United States).



Book Information
ISBN 9780253038272
Author Alan Rosen
Format Paperback
Page Count 266
Imprint Indiana University Press
Publisher Indiana University Press