Staff writer Rarely does a book challenge a reader -- or a reviewer -- as this one does. "Bridge Across Broken Time" is equal parts academic study, meditation and personal memoir. It demands not only reading, but reflection. It is, in short, a daunting assignment, but well worth the effort.
Few people would be capable of covering its terrain -- the way that the Chinese and Jewish cultures use memory -- much less of bringing the depth and intensity that Vera Schwarcz provides. But Schwarcz, a professor of East Asian studies at Wesleyan University and a prolific writer, is an original.
She was born in Cluj, Transylvania, and raised in a household that spoke Romanian, Hungarian and German. She learned Russian and French in school; a tutor taught Hebrew, her parents' language. Her father lost his first wife at Auschwitz; her mother lost her parents, her first husband and a daughter during the war. In the early 1970s, after moving to the United States but before relations between Washington and Beijing were normalized, Schwarcz began her China studies.
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