Philip Uninsky, *Invented Lives from Troubled Times: A Jewish Family’s Forms of Resilience after Surviving Pogroms, Revolution and the Holocaust*. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2026.

Send us Fan MailThis work offers an intriguing and unique viewpoint on the complex routes to resilience, narrating the saga of a large Jewish family that survived decades of intense trauma in the 20th century. In addition to exploring his family’s shared memories, which were interwoven with fabrications, misdirection, and whimsical creativity, the author employs archival sources and years of observations and interactions to reveal their diverse and shifting paths to persistence. These survivors were not, as is often assumed, inevitably weakened by profound trauma and the loss of security and tangible connections to their past. Instead, they succeeded in navigating the present, inventing lives with a wide array of personalities that emerged as a canvas of extremes, from the eccentric to the conventional, the humble to the triumphantly comedic, the conscientious citizen to the rebellious criminal. This is a refreshing look at painful experiences in twentieth-century history.