Testimony: Contmporary Writres Make the Holocaust Personal [Hardcover]

David Rosenberg (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In this sequel to Congregation: Contemporary Writers Read the Jewish Bible , Rosenberg asks 26 notables when they first learned of the Holocaust, how it shaped their careers and other questions. In a keen essay, Phillip Lopate censures what he sees as the Jewish preoccupation with the Holocaust to the exclusion of other human and even other Jewish disasters. Lore Segal fled Austria and lived with five different English families in eight years; the Holocaust drew black American Julius Lester and German Susanne Schlotelburg to Judaism. Unfortunately, many pieces are labored, fragmented and self-indulgent, banal or romanticized trivializations, with the nadir being Gordon Lish: "Yes, I am being paid for this. Yes, I am glad I am being paid for this. No, I did not say that I did not want to be paid for this. No, I did not say go give instead what you are paying to me to somebody who really paid with his bones for this." First serial to Esquire, Tikkun and Partisan Review; Jewish Book Club selection.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Rosenberg, who edited the recent Congregation: Contemporary Writers Read the Jewish Bible ( LJ 11/15/87), has now edited a new collection of essays by 27 contemporary Jewish writers on how the Holocaust affected their lives--emotionally and intellectually--and how they came to terms with it. Contributors include Herbert Gold, Alfred Kazin, Anne Roiphe, Julius Lester, and Marge Piercy. The writing is consistently of a high level. This unusual anthology will be of value to anyone interested in Holocaust studies and Jewish literary life in America. For most collections.
- Robert A. Silver, Shaker Heights P.L., Ohio
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 511 pages
• Publisher: Crown; 1st edition (December 3, 1989)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0812918177
• ISBN-13: 978-0812918175
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.3 pounds
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #6,331,545 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Poet-scholar David Rosenberg is co-author of the New York Times bestseller, The Book of J (with Harold Bloom), and the former editor-in-chief of the Jewish Publication Society. A poet of Toronto Coach House, New York School, and Jerusalem Cricket lineage, he has published several volumes of poetry. A Literary Bible presents thirty years of his original translation from ancient Hebrew.

Rosenberg is a survivor of the writing programs at The New School (with Kenneth Koch and Robert Lowell), University of Michigan (with Donald Hall), Syracuse University (with Delmore Schwartz), and University of Essex, England, where he pursued doctoral studies. He taught for several years at York University (Toronto), the City University of New York, and as a Master Poet for the New York State and Connecticut Arts Councils.

At the age of thirty, Rosenberg retired from teaching. For two decades, while working as a literary editor and translator, he studied the origins of ancient Hebrew literature and the Bible, in New York and Israel (with Robert Gordis, Harry Orlinsky, and Chaim Rabin), while his work appeared prominently in Harper's, The New Republic, Hudson Review, Paris Review and elsewhere around the globe (most recently in Chicago Review, Jacket in Australia, and Open Letter in Canada). A Poet's Bible (1991) won the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Prize, the first major literary award given to a biblical translation in the U.S.

Rosenberg is the author and editor of more than twenty books, including volumes of contemporary writers on the Bible that first raised the question of how Judeo-Christian culture can be newly reinterpreted. During the past decade he has studied the context for ancient biography, leading to a diptych: Abraham: The First Historical Biography (2006) and An Educated Man: A Dual Biography of Moses and Jesus (2010). He continues to publish critical essays on poetry, as well as his long poem, The Lost Book of Paradise (1993) and a literary version of Kabbalah, Dreams of Being Eaten Alive (2000).