SOURCE: "Selfhood and Resistance," in Commonweal, Vol. CVII, No. 13, July 4, 1980, pp. 406-08.

In the following excerpt, Jacoby offers a review of When Memory Comes, outlining the many changes in Friedländer's life and perceptions of himself, the past, and Israel.

In 1942 Pavel Friedlander's parents began to sense that the circle was closing in, and that as foreign Jewish refugees living in Vichy France, they could be certain of nothing in the future. They arranged for their son to be put in the care of the nuns of the Catholic Sodality. Rechristened Paul-Henri—an unmistakably French and Catholic name—the Czech boy passed the war years at Sodality boarding schools, unaware that his parents were deported and eventually killed at Auschwitz. In writing When Memory Comes, an elliptical, meditative account of his childhood and his decision to go to Palestine in 1947, Friedlander is trying to come to terms with...