Click on a thumbnail to go to Google Books.
Loading... We Are Here: Memories of the Lithuanian Holocaustby Ellen Cassedy
None Loading...
Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. We Are Here by Ellen Cassedy is both a personal journey and an exploration of what it means to be a bystander, collaborator, rescuer, or victim of evil. Cassedy travels to Vilnius to study Yiddish, explore her family history, and examine how the people of Lithuania were confronting the past. We Are Here is powerful but not depressing. I could not put it down. Although Between Shades of Gray by Ruta Septeys (about the Soviet occupation of Lithuania in the 1930s and 1940s) is young adult fiction, it would pair well with We Are Here. This book would be an interesting read for a college ethics class. ( ) no reviews | add a review
Biography & Autobiography.
History.
Sociology.
Nonfiction.
HTML: Ellen Cassedy's longing to recover the Yiddish she'd lost with her mother's death eventually led her to Lithuania, once the "Jerusalem of the North." As she prepared for her journey, her uncle, sixty years after he'd left Lithuania in a boxcar, made a shocking disclosure about his wartime experience, and an elderly man from her ancestral town made an unsettling request. Gradually, what had begun as a personal journey broadened into a larger exploration of how the people of this country, Jews and non-Jews alike, are confronting their past in order to move forward into the future. How does a nationâ??how do successor generations, moral beingsâ??overcome a bloody past? How do we judge the bystanders, collaborators, perpetrators, rescuers, and ourselves? These are the questions Cassedy confronts in We Are Here, one woman's exploration of Lithuania's Jewish history combined with a personal exploration of her own family's place in it. Digging through archives with the help of a local whose motives are puzzling to her; interviewing natives, including an old man who wants to "speak to a Jew" before he dies; discovering the complications encountered by a country that endured both Nazi and Soviet occupationâ??Cassedy finds that it's not just the facts of history that matter, but what we choose to do with t No library descriptions found. |
Current DiscussionsNone
Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)940.53History and Geography Europe Europe 1918- World War IILC ClassificationRatingAverage:
Is this you?Become a LibraryThing Author. |