The Literature of Destruction

David Roskies, in one hundred powerful selections, presents the two-thousand year history of Jewish responses to castastrophe. The cyclical nature of violent regimes and their overthrow is delineated in these recurring images of sin, martyrdom, and retribution that have sustained the Jewish people despite pogroms, massacres, and expulsions -- from the destruction of the First Temple through the Holocaust to the eventual return to their homeland.