Originally appeared in The Boston Book Review.
Date approximate.
. . . Several decades after the Holocaust, there is a
danger, for those of us who did not live through it, of a kind of automatism of
Jewish memory; of reiterating narratives of tragedy without any longer bothering
to think about them; of identifying with martyrdom without having earned the
right to it; of remaining fixated on the most awful moment so that we don't
have to look back to the more ambiguous past -- or forward to the troublingly
uncertain future.
"Shtetl" (1997)
HB: What led you to write "Shtetl"?
EH: Many things. It was initially commissioned as a sort of
companion book to the television documentary, "Shtetl." But, of
course, I took it on because I had my very personal and quite impassioned interest
in the subject.
