Obliged by Memory
Literature, Religion, Ethics

Cloth $19.95s   |    0-8156-3064-6    |   2005

A collection honoring Elie Wiesel's seventieth birthday.

Description
Based on a three-day symposium, "The Claims of Memory," this volume conveys the omnipresence of memory in Elie Wiesel's writing and attempts to preserve the flavor of the exchange that took place. It represents several intersecting approaches to memory: the nature of memoir writing; an analysis of contrasting dimensions of memory in victims and persecutors; the ethics of memory; and chronicling of the "memory" of God through key texts in Christian and Jewish traditions.

Contents include:

• Cynthia Ozick, "The Rights of History and the Rights of Imagination"
• Susan Suleiman, "Do Facts Matter in Holocaust Memoirs? Wilkomirski/Wiesel"
• Shlomo Breznitz, "The Advantages of Delay: A Psychological Perspective on Memoirs of Trauma"
• John Silber, "Memory, History, and Ethics"
• Geoffrey Hartman, "The Morality of Fiction and Elie Wiesel"
• Jeffrey Mehlman, "Reflections on the Papon Trial"
• Paula Fredriksen, "Augustine on God and Memory"

View other books in this series

Author
Steven T. Katz is director of the Elie Wiesel Center for Judaic Studies at Boston University. His books include Post-Holocaust Dialogues, which won the National Jewish Book Award.

Alan Rosen is a Meltzer Research Fellow at the Center for Advanced Jewish Studies, University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Sounds of Defiance: The Holocaust, Multilingualism, and the Problem of English.

6 x 9, 224 pages, footnotes, works cited, contributors list, index