Books by David Roskies

Presents the two-thousand year history of Jewish responses to catastrophe. The cyclical nature of violent regimes and their overthrow is delineated in these recurring images of sin, martyrdom, and retribution that have sustained the Jewish people despite pogroms, massacres, and expulsions - from the destruction of the First Temple through the Holocaust to the eventual return to their homeland.

Roskies shows how Yiddish storytelling became a politics of rescue for generations of displaced Jewish artists, embodying their hopes and fears in the languages of tradition. Its protagonists are modern writers who returned to storytelling in the hope of harnessing the folk tradition, and who created copies that are better than the original.