Introduction

I first met Alan Mintz when I was looking at graduate programs in Hebrew literature. It was 1993, and he was teaching at Brandeis. We met for lunch in the faculty dining room, where Alan impressed me with his soft-spoken intensity. I was very young, very concerned at that meeting that my soup might be hiding non-kosher chicken in its murky depths, yet Alan patiently asked all the right questions of me—questions that helped shore up my confidence. In the end, I chose not to go to Brandeis, but Alan remained a presence in my life as a teacher, a mentor, and a friend. He moved to JTS soon after our first encounter, and I went off to Berkeley, but our paths crossed again and again. Most fortuitously, when I interviewed for my first job at the University of Maryland, I learned that Alan had preceded me there.

Throughout my years in training, both as a graduate student and as a young faculty member, Alan sat me down time and again to share his wisdom on how to balance participation in others' projects with a focus on my own, how to make the most of my limited time for scholarship in the years during which I was raising young children and teaching new courses. Alan's writings opened up the field of Hebrew autobiography for me, helping me to conceptualize its relationship to modern Hebrew narrative. He taught me about Hebrew writers in America, something few others were teaching at that time. Through it all, Alan taught me to be unafraid as an American within a field of mostly Israeli scholars.

One of the most important things I learned from Alan was that it might be possible for me to find new things to write about within the field of Holocaust criticism from my unique perspective as a scholar of Hebrew literature. I had, for many years, found that my most inspired teaching was on the subject of Holocaust literature, but I hesitated to build my career on it. My first book, on Devorah Baron, circled around and around the issue of her traumatic sense that she had abandoned the world of her mothers in Eastern Europe before its violent end and participated in its demise by moving to Erets Yisraʾel. Her stories never addressed the Holocaust directly, apart from a few oblique references to the evil that befell the community of which she wrote, but I couldn't help remarking in my work on Baron that her stories grappled with the Holocaust in a way that was yet to be named and analyzed. I have since come to call that dynamic "salvage poetics," a poetics that straddles the ethnographic and the literary, that deals with loss through attempts to salvage what remains of the destroyed culture.

What does all this have to do with Alan? On several occasions when passing through town, Alan stayed with my family in Maryland for Shabbat. On one particular occasion—I remember it was winter because Alan thought he had left a favorite hat and scarf at my house, which I never did find—as we were walking home from synagogue, Alan and I got into a conversation about my latest project. For years, I had been inching closer and closer to my understanding of salvage poetics, theorizing the ethnographic role of allusions to iconic Yiddish stories in modern Israeli novels as a means of salvaging Eastern European culture for Israelis. Alan suggested that I consider writing about the Holocaust in Hebrew literature instead of skirting the issue. It was on that walk, I believe, that the notion of a salvage poetics was born.

A few years after that conversation, in 2012, I saw a notice in The New York Times that Alan had won a Guggenheim Fellowship for his work on S. Y. Agnon. The description of Alan's project as it appears on the Guggenheim website reads as follows:

The research project for which he was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship focuses on the late work of S. Y. Agnon, the great Hebrew writer and Nobel laureate in literature. Between the end...