Where Memory Leads:
A Holocaust Scholar Looks Back
Pulitzer Prize–winning historian and UCLA Professor Emeritus Saul Friedländer returns to memoir to recount a tale of intellectual coming-of-age on three continents. In Where Memory Leads: My Life, a sequel to Friedländer’s poignant first memoir, Where Memory Comes, published forty years ago and recently reissued with a new introduction from Claire Messud, he bridges the gap between the ordeals of his childhood during the German Occupation of France and his present-day towering reputation in the field of Holocaust studies. Reflecting on the wrenching events that induced him to devote sixteen years of his life to writing his masterpiece, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945, Friedländer discusses this book and his life’s work with historian Steven J. Ross.