Where Memory Leads

Forty years after his acclaimed, poignant first memoir, Friedländer returns with Where Memory Leads, bridging the gap between the ordeals of his childhood and his present-day towering reputation in the field of Holocaust studies. Friedländer's initial loyalty to Israel turns into a lifelong fascination with Jewish life and history. This memoir led Friedländer to reflect on the events that led him to devote 16 years of his life to writing his Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 (W&N, 2008)."When Memory Comes retains the very texture of recollection in a literary style characterized by tact and elegance...[the book] is faithful to the workings of memory: It doesn't arrive all at once; it reappears, often without warning, to interrupt the present with the aroma, and the pain, of the past... Where Memory Leads describes in more prosaic, chronological form the itinerary of a historian whose life work has been to piece together an account of massive, state-sponsored crimes while making a place for the voices of those mercilessly persecuted...