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Vera Schwarcz Nominated as a
finalist in History by the Jewish Book Council's National Jewish Book Awards
1998 |
 Traveling frequently between China's Great Wall and Jerusalem's Kotel
(Western Wall), I began to listen to the voices of survivors. Initially, I wrote about
echoes between the recollections of those who went through the Holocaust and the Cultural
Revolution. Over time, these various oral history projects coalesced around a broader
meditation on historical suffering and the process of healing through the arts of
remembrance. Bridge Across Broken Time seeks to bring together  the inner world of
Chinese and Jews who have maintained a fierce attachment to tradition in spite of repeated
experience with events that cut off connectedness to the past. In Chinese, the character
for endurance, ren, symbolizes this effort to bridge what has been broken over and
over again: it show a heart below the knife. The heart and mind is where memory thrives.
The "knife" of history is familiar to all survivors. This book weaves together
the words of poets, historians and my own family's memoirs to show how it is possible to
maintain cultural identity in the face of the most disheartening events.
The four Chinese ideographs remind us that we are put on earth for something more than our personal benefit. According to Mencius, it is not only the Ruler who has the power and responsibility to improve the world. Each person must also strive for the perfectibility of the universe, because each partakes of the unity of heaven. Rabbi Hillel insists on the same broad-mindedness in the words of his own tradition. He knows that a person, like a nation, must look out for his or her own survival. This is why his first question--memorialized in the Pirkei Avot (Ethics of the Fathers)--states: "If I am not for myself, who will be for me?" But concern with survival is not enough. Jewish tradition, like Confucianism, demands a universal morality. I am forbidden to be for myself alone. So Rabbi Hillel adds, "If I am for myself alone, what am I?" and "If not now, when?"
Professor Vera Schwarcz
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Artistic Collaboration by Chava Pressburger |
Bridge Across Broken Time: 
The two oldest, continuous civilizations on earth have yet to be brought into the same
semantic universe. Chinese and Jewish traditions have distinctive histories, each with a
highly nuanced vocabulary for the transmission of cultural remembrance. Other ancient
civilizations, such as Egypt and India, also had deep memory roots, but these withered
over time. Chinese and Jewish traditions, by contrast, have endured uninterrupted over
millennia. This continuity is not the result of historical or geographical accident.
Rather, the fact that Chinese and Jews today can look back upon the past with
familiarity-literally recognizing the ancients' words in their own speech
today--underscores a fierce attachment to remembrance. To understand this connection
requires an effort that is by no means abstract or simply intellectual.
Vera Schwarcz is Freeman Professor of East
Asian Studies at Wesleyan University. She is the author of seven books and over fifty
articles on Chinese intellectual history and comparative memory studies, including Time
for Telling Truth Is Running Out: Conversations with Zhang Shenfu, published by Yale
University Press. If you wish to contact Professor Schwarcz you can
write or fax her at: