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Bridge Across Broken Time: Chinese and Jewish Cultural Memory

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No, this is not about the strength of Chinese cuisine in the American Jewish community. It is about memory and metaphor. How do Jews and Chinese preserve and transmit their cultures. Should we begin to speak of Judeo-Confucian values rather than Judeo-Christian? What did Chinese culture do without the wrath of the god-inspired prophets? This is an original, thoughtful, poetic study from Wesleyan Professor of East Asian Studies Vera Schwarcz. In October 1979, Schwarcz, the daughter of Transylvanian Holocaust survivors, was studying in Beijing. It was Yom Kippur. Inside her dorm room, she was fasting and reading Wiesel's Les Chants des Morte." Outside, the authorities were closing the Democracy Wall. She was struck by the way both Jewish and Chinese cultures act to preserve and transmit fragments of cultural memories, in light of the powers that attempt to eradicate them, namely the Shoah and the Cultural Revolution. Amnesia is a relief from recollection. But both Jewish (if I forget thee..) and Chinese (If you lose the past, the will easily crumbles) cultures reward people for remembrance. This book enlightened me to the Judeo-Confucian tradition; the rabbi and the scholar; Halakha and Li; Rabbi Hillel and Confucius' disciple Mencius; the role of the Jewish prophets; and the lack of the socially just god in China with which one could fight imperial power. Did you know that the metaphoric poetry of Yehudah Amichai is used in China to remember Tiananmen Square? How do the concept of gesher (bridge) and kesher (tying knot) in the Midrash and Bratslaver-Hasidism compare to qiaoliang (bridge) and ren (endurance) and the writings of Yeng Shen? What can be learned from the midrash on god blessing Adam and Eve with the gift of amnesia and the Chinese tale of Old Lady Meng's Soup, which is a broth of amnesia? These are just a few of the questions she explores. I found this book fascinating.