Invented Lives from Troubled Times

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.