Lives Lived and Lost

Lives Lived and Lost stands at the intersection of biography, autobiography, memory and history. It narrates a mother's and daughter's separate perspectives of their experiences before, during and after World War II. The book is also an ethnography of lives of women and children during a transformative period in Eastern Europe and opens a window to the crucial events of that epoch. The challenge of the narratives provides the urgency of the story and the richness of the historical record. It is also an unforgettable story of love, loss and longing for family engulfed by war. The book will resonate with those interested in the lives of individual women and children; scholars, and students of history, gender, and religion, especially Hasidism, and with mainstream readers in this and future generations unfamiliar with life during the first half of the twentieth century in Europe.

Kaja Finkler (PhD CUNY) is professor emerita of anthropology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She has also taught at Eastern Michigan University. Professor Finkler has published widely in her field: she is the author of five books in her areas of expertise, including her last book Experiencing the New Genetics. Family and Kinship on the Medical Frontier published by the University of Pennsylvania Press, and over fifty articles in refereed journals dealing within her specialties, With Lives Lived and Lost she is drawing on personal experience, with the eye of a participant and observer- informed by her anthropological and ethnographic expertise. Golda Finkler, born into a prominent rabbinical family, was descended from several Hasidic dynasties, and was immersed in and profoundly knowledgeable about Jewish Orthodox life and Hasidism. She was also a feminist, and studied law in the Wszechnica Polska University in Warsaw at a time when very few women, particularly Orthodox Jewish women, attempted such programs. After surviving World War II ghettos and slave labor camps, she arrived in the United States in 1946. She had an exceptional memory, and this book is largely based on the more than 100 audio tapes she left behind upon her death in 1991 describing her life, the spirituality that helped her survive the war years, and her milieu.