Amos Goldberg
Preface

History is charged with describing what is - events, responses, survival, and struggle, communal, personal, and family activity - not what is not, such as helplessness. History deals with existence, not absence; with the formation and preservation of identity, not its extreme negation; with the construction and creation of frameworks and institutions, not their disintegration; with the development of ideas and processes of producing meaning, not their erasure. How, then, should history deal with a period characterized first and foremost by what it lacked, by its helplessness, without betraying its most essential aspect? How can we write history about what is not, about what is negated, about what has disintegrated or been distorted?