The Shadow and the Flame
A Story of Loss, Survival, and the Making of Holocaust Memory

Quotes

“James McAuley has written an extraordinary book—one that I didn’t know could be written. The Shadow and the Flame is profoundly moving in its navigation of how the meaning of the Holocaust has been memorialized. It is essential reading.”
—Edmund de Waal, author of The Hare With Amber Eyes

“James McAuley’s magnificent book represents a milestone in Holocaust literature: an intellectually rigorous, ethically searching investigation of the process by which the destruction of European Jewry during World War II became ‘the Holocaust.’ McAuley’s richly detailed work, with its vivid evocations of key figures and critical moments in the history of the evolving Holocaust narrative, irresistibly combines historical precision and narrative sweep. The Shadow and the Flame movingly charts, too, the author’s relationship to both his Judaism and the Holocaust. A tremendous achievement.”
—Daniel Mendelsohn, New York Times bestselling author of The Lost

"This is a book about thinking the unthinkable, and how thinking the unthinkable turned into a struggle to define Jewishness. James McAuley’s book is powerful storytelling. He draws an arc that takes us from the death camps to the Eichmann trial, and from Eichmann to the destruction of Gaza. But his book is also powerful as a meditation on history, on how history is constructed and the uses to which it can be put. Its lessons are for everyone."
—Louis Menand, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Metaphysical Club and The Free World

“In the decades after 1945, survivors, scholars, and writers in Europe, America, and Israel debated the story of the slaughter of the European Jews—what to call it, how to record it, who had the standing to speak about it. The Shadow and the Flame tells the story of that debate, underscoring that the creation of public memory is never accidental and never permanent. James McAuley reminds us that individual choices helped shape what we remember and will continue to define how we interpret the past.”
—Anne Applebaum, New York Times bestselling author of Autocracy, Inc.

"A stunning, harrowing and deeply humane book. The Shadow and the Flame is an impeccably researched account of the men and women who first set out to record the Holocaust, bearing witness while laying the foundations of how the world would remember. In telling their stories, McAuley offers a poignant look at how memory is claimed and shaped, and at what is lost when remembrance becomes doctrine. Essential and timely."
—Clarissa Ward, author of On All Fronts

“At a time of surging antisemitism, this powerful book studies how Jewish thinkers memorialized the systematic extermination committed by Nazi Germany and its European collaborators. This challenging and insightful book grapples with the unmasterable legacy of the genocide of six million Jews while upholding the dignity of Jewish experience.”
—Gary Bass, author of Judgment at Tokyo

"This is a gripping account of the battles of small groups of survivors to shape the memory of the Holocaust. McAuley takes a vast historical theme and tells it as a story of fully drawn individuals. Moving, compelling, relevant to our times, and beautifully written."
—Simon Kuper, columnist for the Financial Times and bestselling author of Soccernomics

"This is historiography at its finest, a vital work that reframes our understanding of the greatest disaster of the past century. With a novelist’s lyricism and a journalist’s clarity, McAuley navigates us through how a cataclysm for European Jewry became the "Holocaust," how shaping the memory of that calamitous evil was more contested than we realize, and how the quarrels of a small group of surviving Jewish scholars still give life to the biggest moral questions of our age."
—Ishaan Tharoor, columnist for The New Yorker

“In sensitively and accurately depicting the multi-faceted identities, complex personalities, and diverse voices of the men and women who first set out to chronicle the perpetration of the Hitlerian “Final Solution of the Jewish Question,” James McAuley has successfully brought to life the critically important origins of the historiography of the Holocaust. At a time when the persecution, oppression, suffering and systematic genocide of European Jewry during World War II is far too often exploited and relativized, The Shadow and the Flame is certain to become required reading and an essential resource.”
—Menachem Z. Rosensaft, visiting professor, Cornell Law School, lecturer, Columbia Law School, and General Counsel Emeritus of the World Jewish Congress