Patterson, David. Sun Turned to Darkness: Memory and Recovery in the Holocaust Memoir. 1st ed. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse UP, 1998.
Ref. articles
- **Patterson, David. “Some Theological Aspects of Jewish Memory in the Holocaust Memoir.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. 548, 1996, pp. 200–218. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1048553.
- Mesher, D. “Shofar.” Shofar, vol. 19, no. 4, 2001, pp. 143–145. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/42943421.
- Flanzbaum, Hilene. “Biography.” Biography, vol. 23, no. 3, 2000, pp. 547–549. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23540284.
Speaking as a Jew,
Page ix. Patterson states that “memory links Jews not only to a past but to an origin that precedes the past,… Such a linkage makes Jewish memory an essential part of sacred history. – This is the premise under which Patterson has written this work.
Page 548. Flanzbaum quote:
By not abandoning his faith, the narrator saves himself from becoming what many survivors became: musselman. The musselman, Primo Levi tells us in Survival in Auschwitz, is the human being who the Nazis robbed of his soul, his humanity, and of course his belief in God. Because these thefts reduce human beings to only their brute physical needs, Levi suggests, they are in some ways worse than the deprivation of life.
Patterson would agree with Levi's basic formulation; that is, that “worse things can be attributed to the Holocaust than the deprivation of life. There is the deprivation of the Jewish soul. For him, the true and lasting destruction of the Holocaust would result from the breaking of the Jewish covenant between God and man. But the memoir, Patterson argues, heals that breach.
Page ix-x. Patterson quotes Rosenzweig – who a generation before the Holocaust said this about Judaism:
In Judaism, says Rosenzweig, "always somehow a Remnant. He is always somehow a Survivor, and inner something, whose exterior was seized by the current of the world and carried off while he himself, what is left of him, remain standing on the shore. Something within him is waiting. And he has something within himself.... But he has a feeling that both the waiting and the having are most intimately connected with each other. And this is just that feeling of the remnant which has the revelation and awaits the salvation. Rosenzweig the Star of Redemption, 1972.
Patterson agrees with Heschel’s commentary that “we are the only channel of Jewish tradition, those who must save Judaism from oblivion, those who must hand over the entire past to the generations to come.”
Page 12-13. Patterson discusses the essence of memory in the Holocaust Memoir.
Patterson sets out the link between the life and death of the soul – and that the foundation for the love of wisdom is a love for life grounded in a profound sense of the sanctity of life…. And that memory is as essential to wisdom as wisdom is to life…
Page 16. Patterson discusses the importance of Selfhood and that the Jews had to re-create Jewish selfhood. And that this comes through in the Holocaust Memoir. They needed to do this, --- not to “situate itself in the midst of a collective humanity, but to mend a wound that has distanced the Jewish soul from humanity.
