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The Shadow and the Flame
James McAuley
  • Published: 2 February 2027
  • ISBN: 9781847927392
  • Imprint: Bodley Head
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 448
  • RRP: $36.99
Categories:

The Shadow and the Flame

Loss, Survival, and the Making of Holocaust Memory

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Intimate in its telling yet epic in scope, The Shadow and the Flame is the definitive history of the fight for Holocaust memory from the end of World War II to the present day

The Shadow and the Flame is the sweeping and definitive history of the fight for Holocaust memory and the larger intellectual debates that raged around its memorial from the end of World War II to the present day.

In 1945, the end of World War II and the liberation of the Nazi camps ended the catastrophe that we now know as the Holocaust. Stunned by grief, survivors faced the task of not only forging new lives but also shaping how this cataclysm might be remembered by generations to come.

The Shadow and the Flame takes as its subject the fierce intellectual battle that ensued – the first of its kind, and one that spanned decades and continents. Acclaimed historian James McAuley takes us into the minds and hearts of the individuals – many well-known, others largely forgotten – who waged that dispute in Europe, the United States, and Israel: from Hannah Arendt, whose reporting from the Eichmann trial enraged her fellow Jews; to Sol Baron, the era’s preeminent Jewish historian who battled to protect the story of his people from the burden of tragedy; to Elie Wiesel, whose account of life at Auschwitz became the one the world chose to embrace, even as it alienated many of his peers.

McAuley transports us from Paris to New York, from the desecrated ghettos of Poland to the newly established state of Israel, as the event we now call the Holocaust made an uneasy transition into memory – one that, far from being neatly resolved, weighs heavily upon the present. Bold, learned, monumental in its scope and infused with the energy and emotion of its principals, The Shadow and the Flames tells the dramatic account of the contentious process – at once painful and shot through with urgency and consequence – of crafting history in real time.
  • Published: 2 February 2027
  • ISBN: 9781847927392
  • Imprint: Bodley Head
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 448
  • RRP: $36.99
Categories:

About the author

James McAuley

James McAuley is the author of The House of Fragile Things, which won the 2022 National Jewish Book Award. He is a journalist and former Paris correspondent for the Washington Post, and he has been published in The Economist, Times Literary Supplement, New York Times, New York Review of Books and other publications. He holds a Ph.D. in French history from the University of Oxford, where he was a Marshall Scholar.
JM

Praise for The Shadow and the Flame

This is a gripping account of the battles of small groups of survivors to shape the memory of the Holocaust. McAuley takes a vast historical theme and tells it as a story of fully drawn individuals. Moving, compelling, relevant to our times, and beautifully written

Simon Kuper

In sensitively and accurately depicting the multi-faceted identities, complex personalities, and diverse voices of the men and women who first set out to chronicle the perpetration of the Hitlerian 'Final Solution of the Jewish Question,' James McAuley has successfully brought to life the critically important origins of the historiography of the Holocaust. At a time when the persecution, oppression, suffering and systematic genocide of European Jewry during World War II is far too often exploited and relativized, The Shadow and the Flame is certain to become required reading and an essential resource for scholars, theologians and students of history alike who seek to understand the purpose and significance of recording, preserving and perpetuating anguished and agonized memory

Menachem Rosensaft

James McAuley has written an extraordinary book—one that I didn’t know could be written. The Shadow and the Flame is profoundly moving in its navigation of how the meaning of the Holocaust has been memorialized. It is essential reading

Edmund de Waal, author of The Hare With Amber Eyes

At a time of surging antisemitism, this powerful book studies how Jewish thinkers memorialized the systematic extermination committed by Nazi Germany and its European collaborators. This challenging and insightful book grapples with the unmasterable legacy of the genocide of six million Jews while upholding the dignity of Jewish experience

Gary Bass, author of Judgment at Tokyo

At a time of surging antisemitism, this powerful book studies how Jewish thinkers memorialized the systematic extermination committed by Nazi Germany and its European collaborators. This challenging and insightful book grapples with the unmasterable legacy of the genocide of six million Jews while upholding the dignity of Jewish experience

Gary Bass, author of Judgment at Tokyo