About the Book
Invented Lives from Troubled Times offers a fresh perspective on the complex pathways to resilience, recounting the saga of an extended Jewish family who survived decades of repeated, severe traumas in the 20th century. In addition to exploring his family's recounted memories, which were clothed with confabulations, misdirection, and droll inventiveness, Uninsky uses archival sources and decades of observations and interactions to uncover their diverse and shifting pathways to persistence. These survivors were not, as is often predicted, ineluctably diminished by profound trauma and the loss of security and concrete anchors to the past. Rather, they succeeded in managing the present, inventing lives of widely divergent personalities that emerged as a canvas of extremes, the eccentric and conventional, the self-effacing and the triumphantly comic, the conscientious citizen and the wayward criminal.
Table of Contents:
Memory of Memories
Challenge and Coincidence
Looking Back Through the Haze
An Extended Family Known and Imagined
Pushing Aside the Haze
What Is This?
Names Given, Names Taken
What’s Not in a Name?
Discarded Past and Reinvented Present
Grifting in Plain Sight
The Inextinguishable Gift
Musical Humor, Mockery, and Flattery
On the Fringe
The Manufacturer’s Fault
Dubitation Among the Playful Pantheists
They Might Return
Platitudinous and Dangerous Stereotypes
A Script for Heroic Death
Language of Memories
Dislodging Memories and Verifying Deceit
Memento Mori and Memento Vivere
In the End
About the Author :
For over three decades, Philip B. Uninsky has brought science and law to service in the US and Africa. An academic social scientist, attorney, and director of non-profits, he has supported highly stressed communities by implementing, evaluating, and sustaining evidence-based models in the areas of mental health, trauma, education, and violence prevention.
Review :
“Growing up on the upper West Side of New York City, spending his teen years in Dallas, becoming a lawyer, losing his older sister to suicide, Philip Uninsky has wrestled with his family dynamics and now in his seventh decade, written about his experiences. This unique memoir by the child of Holocaust survivors, including an enormously gifted mercurial concert pianist father, and a mother who held the family together through the continued reverberations of loss and death into the next generation, is a meditation on the legacy of the Holocaust plus the dislocations, othering and adaptations affecting immigrant parents and their children as they sought to adjust to life in this country. Philip‘s meditatlon on the effects of his intense upbringing reflect the realities of resilience and persistence in a society whose ambivalence to immigrants increasingly challenges efforts at assimilation. It is especially compelling in our current circumstances.”
—Rochelle Ruthchild, Center Associate, Davis Center for Russian & Eurasian Studies, Harvard University
“This remarkable book challenges received wisdom about memory, trauma, and narrative. Rejecting binary and reductive approaches to the veracity of autobiographical memory, Invented Lives from Troubled Times explores the scattered and elusive history of a family torn apart by the unspeakable horrors of the twentieth century. Uninsky does not simply winnow the wheat of truth from the chaff of confabulation, but takes on the messy, creative, costly and ultimately human strategies for managing loss and for building a future for the next generation. Conventional explanations for silences and inconsistencies about the past, such as denial and repression, can be relatively inert or reactive ways of approaching trauma. Instead, this book paints a picture of playfulness, creativity, and adaptability that helps to explain how its subjects "managed to persist despite it all." The result is a compelling and moving intertwining of personal, psychological, and historical ways of thinking through memory, trauma, and resilience.”
—Evelyn Byrd Tribble, Professor of English , University of Connecticut
Philip Uninsky’s gripping memoir plunges us into the stories of his parents’ generation – fantasies, romances, and sagas of survival, despair, and hope from those marked forever by displacement and war. Extraordinary people find ways to protect the next generation from the horrors of the past, in music and art, through black humour, or by shifting identities. Uninsky’s quest for the truths behind the tales, testing family lore against the record, brings a powerful sense of the limits of memory, as omissions, revisions, and constructed versions help carry, manage, and share intense emotions. The 20th century’s extreme events come alive in this riveting book about a unique family and its remarkable stories.
—John Sutton, Centre for the Sciences of Place and Memory, University of Stirling
