Combining poignant memoir and historical research, a son of Holocaust survivors grapples with the dream of Zionism and its consequences.
Israel: A Personal History takes off where Göran Rosenberg's internationally acclaimed and award-winning childhood memoir, A Brief Stop on the Road from Auschwitz, ends. After his father's suicide in 1960 in a small industrial town in Sweden, the remainder of the family, a single mother with two children, emigrates to Israel. At first fully absorbed into the world of pioneer Zionism, enchanted by its visions, formed by its ethos, Rosenberg would eventually embark on a journey of discovery among betrayed ideals, buried stories, false promises, and erased villages.
The result is a deeply personal, painstakingly researched, and beautifully written exploration of the contradictory visions that went into the Zionist project, as well as of the ethnic violence, oppression, discrimination, and dispossession caused by its realization. This book is both an exciting history of ideas and the political autobiography of a Jewish European intellectual, a child of dreams and disillusionments, an astute observer of our times. Praise for A Brief Stop on the Road from Auschwitz:
"An affecting book…It is impossible to read this enormously touching work without contemplating the present day." -Wall Street Journal
"Beautifully wrought…powerful." -New York Times Göran Rosenberg was born in 1948 in Sweden, the son of Auschwitz survivors. He is the author of several books, including the highly acclaimed Det förlorade landet (the original Swedish edition of Israel: A Personal History), A Brief Stop on the Road from Auschwitz (Other Press, 2015), and Another Zionism, Another Judaism (Other Press, 2025). PREFACE TO THE 2025 EDITION
This book is a about a young man's journey from "specious clarity to obscure groping," to quote Arthur Koestler, the intellectual companion of the young man for most of his life. As Koestler had journeyed from the all-too-clarified springs of communism to "a poisoned river strewn with the wreckage of flooded cities and the corpses of the drowned," so the young man would travel from the all-captivating promises of the emerging state of Israel in the early 1960s, to the fabricated histories, deceptive myths, and buried villages that he would discover in its wake. And like Koestler (no further comparisons), he would find it necessary to understand what had happened to him, both the enticement and the deception, both the clarity and the obscurity.
The young man is me a lifetime ago, and this book is my attempt later in life at understanding a movement called Zionism, which brought about the creation of a Jewish state called Israel, which would play such a formative role in my life. In this I have endeavored to weave together my own personal journey with an intellectual exploration of the ideas and historical events that came to shape it.
Although this is a book that reflects travels, memories, experiences, encounters, and readings over a longer period of time, the ideas, people, and events that it brings to life remain as central as ever to the understanding of what the State of Israel is and has become. In this, it also remains a book taking its color and tone, and hopefully some of its value, from the time and the atmosphere in which it was conceived.
Nevertheless, the course of events after October 7, 2023, has prompted a revisit of the book, and of people and places of importance to it, in the hope that this will shed some further light on my "obscure groping" with what I see as a turning point not only for Israel, but also for Jewish existence as a whole. In this edition of the book I have thus replaced the original final chapter with two revisits-fully aware that the final chapter of this story is yet to be written.
ASCENT
The wandering Jew has come to a crossroads, and the consequences of his choice will be felt for cent
