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Focusing upon the life of Chaya Walkin - one little girl from a
distinguished Torah lineage in Poland - this book illustrates the
inner resources of the refugee community that made possible
survival with dignity. Based on a wide variety of sources and
languages, this book is crafted around the voice of a child who was
five years old when she was forced to flee her home in Poland and
start the terrifying journey to Vilna, Kobe, and Shanghai. The Song
of Songs is used to provide an unexpected and poetic angle of
vision upon strategies for creating meaning in times of historical
trauma.
Zhang Shenfu, a founder of the Chinese Communist party,
participated in all the major political events in China for four
decades following the Revolution of 1919. Yet Zhang had become a
forgotten figure in China and the West--a victim of Mao's
determined efforts to place himself at the center of China's
revolution--until Vera Schwarcz began to meet with him in his home
on Wang Fu Cang Lane in Beijing. Now Schwarcz brings Zhang to life
through her poignant account of five years of conversations with
him, a narrative that is interwoven with translations of his
writings and testimony of his friends. Moving circuitously,
Schwarcz reveals fragments of the often contradictory layers of
Zhang's character: at once a champion of feminism and an ardent
womanizer, a follower of Bertrand Russell who also admired
Confucius, and a philosophically inclined political pragmatist.
Schwarcz also meditates on the tension between historical events
and personal memory, on the public amnesia enforced by governments
and the "forgetfulness" of those who find rememberance too painful.
Her book is not only a portrait of a remarkable personality but a
corrective to received accounts and to the silences that abound in
the official annals of the Chinese revolution.
In Colors of Veracity, Vera Schwarcz condenses four decades of
teaching and scholarship about China to raise fundamental questions
about the nature of truth and history. In clear and vivid prose,
she addresses contemporary moral dilemmas with a highly personal
sense of ethics and aesthetics. Drawing on classical sources in
Hebrew and Chinese (as well as several Greek and Japanese texts),
Schwarcz brings deep and varied cultural references to bear on the
question of truth and falsehood in human consciousness. An
attentiveness to connotations and nuance is apparent throughout her
work, which redefines both the Jewish understanding of emet (a
notion of truth that encompasses authenticity) and the Chinese
commitment to zhen (a vision of the real that comprises the
innermost sincerity of the seeker's heart-mind). Works of art, from
contemporary calligraphy and installations to fake Chinese
characters and a Jewish menorah from Roman times, shed light light
on the historian's task of giving voice to the dread-filled past.
Following in the footsteps of literary scholar Geoffrey Hartman,
Schwarcz expands on the "Philomela Project, which calls on
historians to find new ways of conveying truth, especially when
political authorities are bent on enforcing amnesia of past
traumatic events. Truth matters, even if it cannot be mapped in its
totality. Veracity is shown again and again to be neither black nor
white. Schwarcz' accomplishment is a subtle depiction of "fractured
luminosity," which inspires and sustains the moral conviction of
those who pursue truth against all odds.
The Singing Crane Garden in northwest Beijing has a history dense
with classical artistic vision, educational experimentation,
political struggle, and tragic suffering. Built by the Manchu
prince Mianyu in the mid-nineteenth century, the garden was
intended to serve as a refuge from the clutter of daily life near
the Forbidden City. In 1860, during the Anglo-French war in China,
the garden was destroyed. One hundred years later, in the 1960s,
the garden served as the "ox pens," where dissident university
professors were imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution. Peaceful
Western involvement began in 1986, when ground was broken for the
Arthur Sackler Museum of Art and Archaeology. Completed in 1993,
the museum and the Jillian Sackler Sculpture Garden stand on the
same grounds today. In Place and Memory in the Singing Crane
Garden, Vera Schwarcz gives voice to this richly layered corner of
China's cultural landscape. Drawing upon a range of sources from
poetry to painting, Schwarcz retells the garden's complex history
in her own poetic and personal voice. In her exploration of
cultural survival, trauma, memory, and place, she reveals how the
garden becomes a vehicle for reflection about history and language.
Encyclopedic in conception and artistic in execution, Place and
Memory in the Singing Crane Garden is a powerful work that shows
how memory and ruins can revive the spirit of individuals and
cultures alike.
Focusing upon the life of Chaya Walkin - one little girl from a
distinguished Torah lineage in Poland - this book illustrates the
inner resources of the refugee community that made possible
survival with dignity. Based on a wide variety of sources and
languages, this book is crafted around the voice of a child who was
five years old when she was forced to flee her home in Poland and
start the terrifying journey to Vilna, Kobe, and Shanghai. The Song
of Songs is used to provide an unexpected and poetic angle of
vision upon strategies for creating meaning in times of historical
trauma.
In this remarkable book, Vera Schwarcz explores the meanings of
cultural memory within the two longest surviving civilizations on
earth. The author of previous books that the New York Times Book
Review called "moving" and Jonathan Spence termed "subtle, elegiac,
and elegant," Schwarcz finds a bridge between the vastly different
Chinese and Jewish traditions in the fierce commitment to
historical memory they share. For both, a chain of remembrance has
allowed tradition to endure uninterrupted from ancient times to the
present; for both, the transmission of remembrance and the bearing
of active witness to the significance of the past are high moral
values. From her unique standpoint as China scholar and daughter of
survivors of the Holocaust, Schwarcz uncovers resonances between
the narratives of Chinese intellectuals recovering from the trauma
of the Cultural Revolution and the halting tales of her own
parents. Focusing on the transmission of cultural memory in these
two cultures, the author examines how metaphor becomes an aid to
memory, the role of personal remembrance in public commemorations,
and the process of healing historical wounds. Combining poetry and
historiography, oral interviews and archival documents, this book
brings to life the struggles of Chinese and Jewish survivors who
managed to cultivate memory through inimical times and preserve the
continuity of their long traditions.
It is widely accepted, both inside China and in the West, that
contemporary Chinese history begins with the May Fourth Movement.
Vera Schwarcz's imaginative new study provides China scholars and
historians with an analysis of what makes that event a turning
point in the intellectual, spiritual, cultural and political life
of twentieth-century China.
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