Sun Turned to Darkness: Memory and Recovery in the Holocaust Memoir

by David Patterson

Overview

In examining the recorded memoirs of fifty Holocaust survivors, David Patterson draws on the teaching of the sacred texts of Jewish tradition and the philosophy of Emil Fackenheim and Emmanuel Levinas. That memory, he argues, serves three purposes for Jews struggling to recover after the Holocaust. First, a recovery of tradition: Not only was the body of Israel targeted for destruction, but also its very soul, as that soul was defined by God, Torah, and sacred history. Second, a recovery from an illness: These Jews suffer from the illness of indifference that plagued heaven and earth throughout the event. Third, these memoirs reveal the open-ended nature of recovery as a process that has no resolution: The survivors emerge from the camps, but the camps stay with the survivors and cast their shadow over the world. Readers are transformed into witnesses who face a never-ending process of remembrance, for the sacred, in spite of indifference.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780815605300
Publisher:	Syracuse University Press
Publication date:	09/01/1998
Series:	Religion, Theology and the Holocaust
Pages:	248
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.69(d)

About the Author

David Patterson is Distinguished Professor and Director of the Honors Program at the University of Memphis. He is the author of more than eighty articles on topics in philosophy, literature, Judaism, Holocaust, and education, and his books include The Greatest Jewish Stories Ever Told, Pilgrimage of a Proselyte, From Auschwitz to Jerusalem, and The Shriek of Silence: The Phenomology of the Holocaust.

Editorial Reviews

A sensitive and original book. It's a gem that creatively demonstrates how memoir literature addresses the break in the cosmos wrought by the Shoah. Moving beyond earlier literary interpretations, David Patterson speaks poetically of the soul's memory of itself, and of God. He writes with both insight and reverence in demonstrating how the recovery attested in memoir literature is, like the Jewish tradition itself, eternal.

Alan L. Berger

Patterson has expounded 'Recovery' after the Holocaust as I have defined it-but more correctly than I could have done myself.

Emil L. F ackenlieim

A major contribution to the literature of the Holocaust. Patterson reinterprets Holocaust narratives from the perspective of post-Holocaust philosophy and theology. In doing so, he restores not only a religious, but a human, dimension to the subject.

David H. Hirsch

Examines the recorded memoirs of 50 Jewish survivors of the Holocaust and analyses what they reveal about the state of modern Judaism in the latter half of the 10th century. Drawing on the teachings of the sacred texts of the Jewish tradition and the philosophies of Emannuel Levinas and Emil Fackenheim, the author argues that the continuing memory serves the purposes of recovering the traditions of God, Torah, and history and coming to grips with a sickness of worldwide indifference to the Holocaust. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

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