Reflections: Auschwitz, Memory, and a Life Recreated [Paperback]

Agi Rubin (Author), Henry Greenspan (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 2006

Reflections is a book of memories, but it is equally a book about memory. Speaking of herself as well as other Holocaust survivors, Agi Rubin notes:

 

   We survivors are a bundle of contradictions.  We push away the past, and we are constantly drawn back to it.  When we are here, we are also there.  And when we are there, we are also here. 

 

“Survivors,” Agi tells us, “are jugglers. Life goes on, death goes on, and survivors themselves go on—somewhere in between.”

What is it like to live within such contradictions?  While most survivor memoirs end at liberation, Reflections follows the fate of Holocaust memories over the course of an entire life. Agi describes in detail her initial awakening and the journey home, being a young survivor in the giddy limbo of postwar Europe, recreating lives and families in the United States, responding to the unanticipated surge of interest in the Holocaust in recent years. Throughout, the inner dialogue with memory deepens.  “New experiences reflect old ones,” says Agi. “They put them in a different light, or a different darkness.”  These reflections are the story this book tells about Auschwitz, memory, and a life recreated. 

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Reflections is a work whose brevity masks its intensity. The work can be read in one sitting, but it will sit with the reader for a long time.… Agi Rubin’s diary entries three score years ago are even more poignant now than they were when written and they are illuminated by the journey she has taken since Auschwitz, since liberation. "

—Michael Berenbaum, Professor of Theology, University of Judaism Author of The World Must Know, A Promise to Remember: The Holocaust in the Words and Voices of its Survivors

 

"Compact, poetic, and accessible, this book will be required reading in universities and secondary schools. For all readers, it will be a milestone in their own reflections about the terrors and hopes of our times, then and now. Reflections is quite simply, one of the most important Holocaust memoirs I have ever read. It is the real thing; a landmark achievement."

—Sidney Bolkosky, Voice/Vision Holocaust Oral History Archive Director

"Reflections is the result of a one-of-a-kind interaction between Agi Rubin, an eloquent survivor of that catastrophe, and Henry Greenspan, a Holocaust scholar whose in-depth probing of survivor testimony has been pioneering and penetrating in ways that are unsurpassed.

—John K. Roth, Director, Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights, Claremont McKenna College

From the Author

Reflections is a book of memories, but it is equally a book about memory. The fruit of a twenty-five year conversation between a Holocaust survivor and a psychologist-playwright, and extending a diary that Agi Rubin began at liberation, Reflections describes the fate of Holocaust memories over the course of an entire life. "New experiences reflect old ones," Agi notes. "They put them in a different light, or a different darkness." These reflections, the continuing dialogue between past and present, are the story this book tells about Auschwitz, memory, and a life recreated.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 196 pages
• Publisher: Paragon House (September 1, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1557788618
• ISBN-13: 978-1557788610
• Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 5.2 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,334,552 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)