SOURCE: "Alone in the World," in The New York Times Book Review, July 15, 1979, pp. 1, 27.

Elon is an Austrian-born Israeli journalist, historian, and novelist. In the following positive review of When Memory Comes, he discusses Friedländer's struggle with identity.

Saul Friedländer was born "in Prague at the worst possible moment, four months before Hitler came to power." In this harrowing, deeply moving memoir [When Memory Comes]—one part the Gothic tale of a Jewish orphan alone in Nazi-occupied France preparing to become a Catholic priest, the other part the diary he kept many years later in Jerusalem—he undertakes an evocative voyage into his past that is likely to leave many a reader shaken. This is not really a holocaust tale. Saul Friedländer knew nothing of the holocaust until afterward. He knew only a childhood whose calm was continually being shattered, the pieces falling away, picked...