When Memory Comes: The Classic Memoir

About this book

A classic of Holocaust literature the eloquent acclaimed memoir of childhood by a Pulitzer-winning historian now reissued with a new introduction by Claire Messud Four months before Hitler came to power Saul Friedlnder was born in Prague to a middle-class Jewish family. In 1939 seven-year-old Saul and his family were forced to flee to France where they lived through the German Occupation until his parents ill-fated attempt to flee to Switzerland. They were able to hide their son in a Roman Catholic seminary before being sent to Auschwitz where they were killed. After an imposed religious conversion young Saul began training for priesthood. The birth of Israel prompted his discovery of his Jewish past and his true identity. Friedlnder brings his story movingly to life shifting between his Israeli present and his European past with grace and restraint. His keen eye spares nothing not even himself as he explores the ways in which the loss of his parents his conversion to Catholicism and his deep-seated Jewish roots combined to shape him into the man he is today. Friedlnders retrospective view of his journey of grief and self-discovery provides readers with a rare experience: a memoir of feeling with intellectual backbone in equal measure tender and insightful.