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Ruth Linden's bold, experimental book explores the interconnected processes of remembering, storytelling, and self-fashioning. Juxtaposing autobiography and ethnography, Linden begins this study by situating herself in the context of her assimilated Jewish family, where the Holocaust was shrouded in silences.

Urged forward by these silences, Linden, a feminist and sociologist, began to interview Jewish Holocaust survivors in 1983. As Linden interprets survivors' accounts of the death camps and the resistance, she reveals complex ways in which selves are constructed through storytelling. The stories that unfold are continuously fashioned and refashioned—never stripped of context or frozen in time. What emerges is an unexpectedly elegant montage in which interviewee, interviewer, and author are intertwined.

Linden's meetings with survivors and her encounters with their stories transformed her as a feminist, a Jew, and a social scientist. Her analysis reveals the intimate connections between an ethnographer's lived experience and her interpretations of others'. Linden's reflections on the process of ethnography belie the rhetoric of positivism in the social sciences. They will inspire other scholars to break free of research and writing practices in their own disciplines that efface the ineluctable bond between knower and known. All readers will be challenged to reexamine the Holocaust in an intensely personal light and to reconsider the meanings of survival in our own time.

Cutting across the boundaries of ethnography and autobiography to create a new kind of text, Making Stories, Making Selves offers a significant contribution to interpretive social science and the literature of the Holocaust. Linden's original and courageous work is vital reading for Holocaust scholars, students of modern Jewish life, sociologists, feminist theorists, and all readers seeking to understand their own relationship to the Holocaust.

Powerful oral histories revealing the unique experiences of women during the Holocaust.

In Mothers, Sisters, Resisters, 25 survivors of the Holocaust furnish compelling and historically vital testimony that illuminates and explores Jewish women's experiences during that terrible period. In entries that preserve each voice, personality, and style, survivors describe their efforts to evade Nazi laws and subsequent dehumanization, protect their children and siblings, and maintain their Jewish identity.

Throughout each narrative, from Brandla Small's description of having her child dragged from her arms at Auschwitz, to Eva Schonbrun's remembrances of her sister who refused to leave her siblings and save herself, to Emilie Schindler's account of rescuing Jews left abandoned on a cattle car, we become intimately involved with each woman's struggle and eventual survival. We also gain a new appreciation and understanding of the Holocaust experiences unique to women.