LIFE MUST GO ON

Survival and storytelling.

As the last survivors of the Holocaust depart, their children continue to tell their stories. In this account of one survivor’s life in the vanished world of Lithuanian Jewry, Sol Lurie’s daughter and her collaborator tell of a young boy stripped of his childhood. Lurie is far from the most famous of survivors. Yet his personal tale gives hope to modern readers faced with political struggle and an increasing social intolerance. The heart of this book is a history of the Jews in Lithuania: how 19th- and early-20th-century cities such as Vilna and Kaunas became centers of religious learning. The schools and rabbis of those cities shaped modern Judaism—how the Torah and the Talmud are taught, how rabbinic authority gains its voice, and how men and women could live devotional lives in the modern world. The book presents a readable, capsule history of Jewish life in northern Europe, largely for the purpose of restoring Lithuanian traditions to a history long seen as moving largely between German-speaking urban secularism and Slavic shtetl devotion. The real impact of the work may not be its recap of history or its personal tale, but rather the way that it encourages everyone to tell a unique story of survival. At stake is less the detail of life in the camps (a story told and retold powerfully over the past several decades) than the afterlife of those who made it through. If the injunction “never forget” remains, remembering will always be about the story, whether it is mundane or magical.

A moving tale of personal resilience, told through a history of Lithuanian Jewry.