This engaging reexamination of IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME considers how the narrator defines himself, how this compares to what we know of Marcel Proust himself, and what the significance is of these various points of commonality and divergence. We know, for example, that the author did not hide his homosexuality, but the narrator did. Why the difference? We know that the narrator tried to marginalize his part-Jewish background. Does this reflect the author’s position, and how does the narrator handle what he tries, but does not manage, to dismiss? These are major questions raised by the text and reflected in the text, to which the author’s life doesn’t give obvious answers.

Forty years after his acclaimed, poignant first memoir, WHEN MEMORY COMES, Saul 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. After abandoning his youthful conversion to Catholicism, he rediscovers his Jewish roots as a teenager and builds a new life in Israeli politics. Most importantly, this memoir led Friedländer to reflect on the wrenching events that induced 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.

Four months before Hitler came to power, Pavel Friedländer was born in Prague to a middle-class Jewish family. In 1939, seven-year-old Pavel and his family were forced to flee Czechoslovakia for France, but his parents were able to conceal their son in a Roman Catholic seminary before being shipped to their destruction. After a whole-hearted religious conversion, young Pavel began training for priesthood. The birth of Israel prompted his discovery of his Jewish past and his true identity. Friedländer describes his experiences, moving from Israeli present to European past with composure and elegance.