Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review"Winner of the Ernst Fraenkel Prize, Wiener Holocaust Library"
"Finalist for the National Jewish Book Award, Holocaust Category"
"A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year"
"An astonishing breadth of interviews of survivors and their relatives. . . . Of profound interest to serious students and readers of history." * Library Journal *
"Joskowicz offers a fascinating and often heartbreaking account of the Roma struggle for justice and restitution in the face of persecution. . . . The great virtue of Joskowicz’s book, alongside the comprehensiveness of its research, is its refusal to reduce any of the weighty issues it discusses to abstractions, or to stray from the complex and often contradictory human experiences at stake. Instead, Joskowicz grounds his account in the lives of the people whose suffering and whose activism animate his scholarship."
---Daniel Kraft, Slate"A clear, flowing portrait of this understudied but deeply violated population that fundamentally alters our perception of the Holocaust, enlarging it to include the Romani victims and bringing to the fore their quest for historical justice and self-representation. . . . [An] illuminating new book."
---Linda F. Burghardt, Jewish Book Council"Remarkable. . . .At a time when Holocaust parallels have become once again contentious and politicised, Joskowicz’s book builds a refreshing case for careful and nuanced historical comparison."
---Dr Christine Schmidt, BBC History Magazine"[Joskowicz] brings new focus to the testimonies of victims of the Nazi regime, especially the stories of long-ignored Romani victims, often gathered from the witness testimonies of and interviews with Jewish survivors of the camps. . . . A deeply important book for the questions it raises about the ways in which historians collect and analyze history." * Choice Reviews *
"It is rare for an academic text to be highly readable, accessibly written, and an important work of historical scholarship, but Ari Joskowicz’s
Rain of Ash: Roma, Jews, and the Holocaust ticks all three of these boxes. . . . This book is an absolute must-read. Ultimately,
Rain of Ash is a completely novel achievement, a real boon to multiple fields of study, and well worth your time."
---Claire Greenstein, Ethnic and Racial Studies"Incisive. . . . Joskowicz grapples with fundamental issues in the field of memory studies, namely, what and how we remember, and the way that a politicization of memory can destabilize or challenge dominant narratives of history. . . . A significant and poignant contribution to the field of Holocaust (and Romani) Studies."
---Natasza Gawlick, Journal of Austrian Studies"Time and eloquent. . . . Each chapter of
Rain of Ash offers new and sometimes surprising data and insights, to which a short review cannot do justice. It draws on adventurous research in archives all over the world and on digitised sources which have become available in recent decades. Joskowicz has exploited these imaginatively to identify the personalities and reconstruct the interactions that drove institutional and political engagement with the facts and significance of the Romani Holocaust between 1945 and the 2010s. He displays an admirable sensitivity to the challenges as well as the opportunities offered by this expanding source base, and he writes with an analytical clarity that is simultaneously humane and even-handed."
---Eve Rosenhaft, Continuity and Change
