Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish Culture [Hardcover]

David Roskies (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Review

Eloquent and moving...daring and comprehensive...What Mr. Roskies has accomplished in Against the Apocalypse documents a virtually unknown chapter in the history of the refusal of Jews throughout the ages to surrender (New York Times Book Review )

This majestic work has a quality, almost unseen today, of being at the same time erudite and elegantly written. (Hadassah Magazine )

Roskies's work, densely argued, richly allusive, exemplary in its far-ranging scholarship, is itself a deeply felt response to the Holocaust and its memories; an affirmation of continuities as well as violent endings. (Times Literary Supplement )

In this profound, subtle, and deeply moving book, Roskies lets us listen to the dialogue that the Nazis destroyed. It is hard to imagine a better way of keeping faith with those who died. (Boston Globe )

A probing, seasoned, brilliant work. (Los Angeles Times )

About the Author

David G. Roskies is the Sol and Evelyn Henkind Chair in Yiddish Literature at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Harvard University Press (May 7, 1984)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0674009150
• ISBN-13: 978-0674009158
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.2 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,366,668 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #72 in Books > Literature & Fiction > World Literature > Yiddish

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Customer Reviews

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1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Jewish disaster and its interpretation, December 5, 2004

By 

Shalom Freedman "Shalom Freedman" (Jerusalem,Israel) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish Culture (Paperback)

This is from the back jacket of the book, "The Holocaust in its enormity , has been viewed as an apocalyptic event- standing outside history, without analogy or precedent. Challenging this view David Roskies places the Holocaust , and the literary responses of victims and survivors, in the context of generations of Jewish response to persecutions , pogroms and communal catastrophes."
This is the second last paragraph on the final page of the book.
"Catastrophe, in fact , has always been a part of the process of rethinking the past. Like the rabbis of old who worked with any and all available materials- cultic, prophetic, apocalyptic,gnostic,mystic, platonic- so long as they could bridge the abyss left in the wake of the Great Catastrophe , the writers and artists of the nineteeth and twentieth centuries mixed symbol systems,juxtaposed sacred and profane, borrowed ferociously in order to face their ever- greater losses. Just as the Temple destructions were consciously fashioned into archetypes by the exiles in Baylonia and by the Tananaim and Amoraim, so the new destruction, the Holocaust, was lifted from the straight line of allusions back to the old archetypes and inaugurated into its own archetypal nature." pp..310
I understand that the interpretation of Disaster has been a fundamental element in Jewish life down the centuries. But I still think it is necessary to maintain that there was something wholly singular in the Shoah i.e. the attempt at total extinction of the Jewish people and attempt to totally deny our humanity.