Description

An urgent history – intimate in its telling, epic in its scope – of the argument that shaped the postwar world: how to define and remember the Holocaust.

‘Extraordinary and profoundly moving. The Shadow and the Flame is essential reading’ EDMUND DE WAAL

‘Absolutely superb. An important and hitherto untold story which is more relevant now than ever’ BART VAN ES

The end of the Second World War marked the end of the attempted extermination of the Jewish people. Stunned by grief, survivors faced the task of not only forging new lives but of shaping how this cataclysm might be remembered by generations to come.

Taking us into the minds and hearts of the individuals – some well-known, like Hannah Arendt, Salo Baron and Elie Wiesel, others largely forgotten – who reckoned with this atrocity, The Shadow and the Flame recounts the fierce debate that ensued. From Paris to New York, from the desecrated ghettos of Poland to the fledgling kibbutzim of Israel, acclaimed historian James McAuley reveals how the event that gradually came to be called the Holocaust made an uneasy transition into memory – a debate that, far from being neatly resolved, weighs all too heavily upon the present.

Bold, learned and infused with the energy and emotion of its principals, The Shadow and the Flame is the dramatic account of the contentious process – at once painful and shot through with urgency and consequence – of crafting history in real time.

‘Compelling, relevant to our times, and beautifully written’ SIMON KUPER

‘Reminds us that the creation of public memory is never accidental, and never permanent’ ANNE APPLEBAUM

‘A stunning, deeply humane book’ CLARISSA WARD

‘Magnificent … represents a milestone in Holocaust literature’ DANIEL MENDELSOHN