Book Review

Comparative/World

The Jewish masses, who, from the early nineteenth century, emigrated to America, passed a metaphorical crossroad that David G. Roskies calls the "Jewish Bermuda Triangle." If divers were lowered to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean midway between Hamburg and New York, they would find a million pair of phylacteries thrown overboard by Jewish men from ships taking them from the old world of Eastern Europe to the new world (p. 89). This was originally a critical remark by an Orthodox rabbi, fearful that values and normative patterns of behavior would be abandoned and opposed to the uncontrolled onslaught of America's temptations that commanded a painful price: assimilation and loss of faith. But it also eloquently illustrates two dimensions of modern Jewish life: the experience of uprootedness and the experience of secularization. They are, in fact, the focus of this captivating, perceptive book by Roskies, a historian of modern Jewish culture and scholar of Hebrew and Yiddish literature, whose identity was shaped by memories of his family's past in Eastern Europe, by the world of Jews in Canada and the United States, and by his empathetic mindfulness of developments in Israeli culture.

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The central axis of this fascinating book is the experience of losing the past. Underpinning it is awareness of the intense crisis that gripped modern Jewry and spurred the transformation of their collective memory. Many of these Jews have lost the old Jewish world in Eastern Europe, and along with it, the commitment to religious practice, the acceptance of rabbinical authority, the Jewish library, and memories of the past. But this crisis, as Roskies shows us, is not destructive; rather, it poses an immense challenge to modern Jews, who have become secularized and now must shape for themselves alternative institutions, new ideologies, a new world of images, literature, poetry, and theater to feed the collective memory and reconstruct it.

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