More About this Book
Where does memory go
when it cannot be spoken?
Now we know: It goes on to haunt future generations. It passes unscathed through temperatures that can melt iron and reduce bone to ash. And somewhere far removed in space and decades into the future, a stranger wakes out of a sound sleep with an inexplicable nightmare and a despair so deep as to negate life itself.
At seventeen, Alex was torn from his home and deported to Auschwitz. He outlived his family, his faith, and his culture. His memory filled with the death of a people, unable to speak of what he had done to survive, he was locked in the silent prison of his guilt. This unforgettable and breathtakingly powerful book follows Alex on his journey from the flames of Birkenau to atonement, transformation, and redemption.
Returning is a haunting and compelling exploration of the choices we make in a choiceless time, the terrifying strength and burden of the will to survive, and the power of the human spirit to transcend even its own destruction. It will leave you changed forever.
Advance Praise for Returning
-Chaya Rosen, author of In the Shadow of God.
Returning is a must-read for those wishing to embark on a profound, painful, but ultimately hopeful journey into the human soul.
– Yael Unterman, author of Nehama Leibowitz, Teacher and Bible Scholar and The Hidden of Things: Twelve Stories of Love & Longing.
Links to Educational Materials
Author website: https://www.yaelshahar.com.
Reader’s Guide: Questions for readers to ponder as they progress through the book: https://www.yaelshahar.com/readers/returning-discussion-topics//
Discussion Guides:
- Moral and Religious dilemmas in the Holocaust: Topics for group discussion based on dilemmas raised in the book: https://www.yaelshahar.com/moral-dilemmas-holocaust/.
- Reflections and Resources on T’shuvah: Topis for discussion on T’shuvah, supplemented by Jewish sources that can serve as a basis for deeper learning. https://www.yaelshahar.com/readers/reflections-resources-tshuvah-free-download/
Have questions or feedback?
Yael Shahar can be reached at: yshahar@kasvapress.com.
Chaya Rosen –
I have always been intrigued by the notion of memory—lost memory, sacred memory, revealed memory…. This is probably related to my own background; I am a daughter of survivors. As I watched my mother’s face entreating the names of her lost family, the Kaddish prayers, the circular motion of her hands at candle lighting, it all seemed to say “bring them back, keep them from fading.”
Reading Yael Shahar’s Returning, and her journey into Ovadya’s past, I immediately knew this would go further than the many Holocaust accounts on my bookshelf. This experience of “returning” would become an unforgettable encounter.
Ovadya’s tragedy is that, after the last of the victims have entered the gas chambers, he is still there, remembering. He loses every vestige of a recognizable human being, becoming a fragmented soul, barely connected to its past.
But from this descent, he ascends through time, emerging at last on the pages of Talmudic discourse. In Rav Ish Shalom’s small study, we are all confronted by questions: “When does survival become a crime?” “When does choice become treason?”
That’s when I found myself yelling at all the holocaust books that line my walls, “I thought we were done with all of this. It’s been over 70 years, what more agony do I need to go through? We haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of the Shoah….”
It begins with Yael Shahar’s language. Its imagery and power is astounding. Invoking the jars of testimony buried by the Sonderkommando in Birkenau, Ovadya explains: “I am like those buried jars. The memory is buried inside and surfaces in an unpredictable manner. Some is blurred by time or willful forgetting. Some of it is as clear as if no time has passed. And sometimes it is not past at all, but present….”
Returning is about asking hard questions. Many of these questions have never been asked until now, perhaps, because we’ve been too frightened of learning the answers. But the time has come to ask those questions. And in the end, we all stand together as witnesses at the Viddu. Mourners, innocent and the broken, exhausted, fearful… and forgiving. For certain I would be less of who I am, had I not experienced this journey of redemption, this revival, this return.
If you are a child of survivors yearning to connect to your parents’ unspoken past, if you simply want to try to unravel the mystery of human evil, or if you want to understand how it was possible, then Returning is the book to read. But be warned: it may make you understand too much.