In this well-researched and interesting book, Monika Rice studies the changing patterns of memory in the testimonies of the Polish-Jewish Holocaust survivors in Poland and Israel archived, respectively, in the Jewish Historical Institute (ŻIH) and Yad Vashem (YV). In Poland, the testimonies under consideration were collected between the years 1944 and 1950, before the communist regime imposed restrictions on Jewish institutions, whereas in Israel the testimonies Rice studies were submitted between the years of 1955 and 1970, in a period marked by ideological shifts affected by historical transformations of Israel's geopolitical situation. The outcome of the research, which focuses on the theme of early postwar social interactions between the survivors and the Polish population, highlights the context of time and place in creating collective memory. That is to say, the differing political and ideological circumstances inform the narrative choices of the testifying survivor.

As the author insightfully argues, both the raison d’être and the methodology of the collections differ. The Polish initiative emerged mainly (but not exclusively) from the premonition that due to a variety of international political interests, including the prevalence and accessibility of the German sources, the Jewish story of destruction will be marginalized, perhaps even altogether eliminated. Therefore, the questionnaire for the survivors constructed by the Jewish Historical Commission (later ŻIH) focused mainly on life before the war, the process of extermination, and the circumstances of survival; lesser emphasis was placed on the survivor's liberation and return to his/her hometown. Thus, the scarcity of the Polish-Jewish encounters could be attributed to the priorities set by the Commission. But while the need to collect testimonies was immediate, the methodology drew upon the historiographical genre of khurban forshung (research of the disaster), which focused on personal everyday narratives. The importance of the personal narratives and daily life in historical accounts was developed by Simon Dubnow in the wake of the Kishinev Pogrom in 1903. While the in/famous debates about the relevance of life stories in historical research started in the 1970s and are still going on, Rice notes that the Dubnowian historiographical method was adopted by Emanuel Ringelblum in Oneg Shabbat, and then continued in the process of evidence collection.

While the Commission intended to write the history of the tragic victimization of Jews, Israel preferred to construct the history of Jewish heroism. The Zionist ideology of the negation of the Diaspora, combined with the concept of the new [militant] Jew, instilled an attitude of contempt toward the “ordinary” Holocaust survivors, who “went like lambs to the slaughter” (90). By glorifying the acts of resistance and especially that of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the Israeli historians proposed a Holocaust narrative with a subtext that reaffirmed the Zionist idea of the indispensability of a Jewish sovereign state. In Israel, therefore, the dominant ideology determined the method of selection: the triumphalist testimonies that correlated with the military exploits of Israeli soldiers shaped the early Holocaust historiography. Subsequently, however, the controversies over the reparations from Germany (1952–53), the trial of Dr. Rudolph Kasztner (1954–5), and especially the Eichmann trial (1961), as well as the period of uncertainty that preceded the 1967 Six Day War, brought forth a measure of identification with Jewish suffering in the Holocaust. Nonetheless, the eventual attention to the individual story of the victim resulted in only a limited number of testimonies of postwar Jewish-Polish encounters. Even though it would have justified the survivors’ choice to immigrate to Israel, over 30% of the testimonies did not mention this issue. While the author correctly attributes that evasion mainly to the survivor's immersion in his/her new life in Israel, I would add that the silence about being persecuted, even after the war, may signal the continuing sense of shame of weakness instilled by the Holocaust and exacerbated by the initial Zionist treatment.

I would also like to mention briefly a lengthy, about thirty-page long chapter, “A Tale of Two Doctors,” which raises the issue of the authenticity of the testimony. While this discussion does not seem to fit into the main thesis of this study, which juxtaposes ideological approaches to the testimonies, it raises some interesting ideas about the proximity of personal story and fiction. Grounding her analysis in Philippe Lejeune's postulation that, “if we remain within the level of analysis within the text, there is no difference” between autobiographies and autobiographical novels (163), Rice claims the factual reliability of these writings. I would suggest that these interesting texts deserve a separate study.

To conclude, this is a serious, well-done study which makes an important contribution to the field of Holocaust studies. Even a bigger merit lies in the contribution it makes to the theoretical considerations of the extent to which the collective consciousness and the personal narrative affect, shape, and mold each other, and how the aspects of time and place impact the ways we are expected to remember.