David G. Roskies

[2] His mother, Masha (born 1906, Wilno) and her family were forced to flee Europe for Montreal, via Lisbon and New York City in 1940.

[4] After learning in Yiddish secular schools in Montreal, Roskies was educated at Brandeis University, where he received his doctorate in 1975.

In 1984, Harvard University Press published Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish Culture, which won the Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize from Phi Beta Kappa and has since been translated into Russian and Hebrew.

The fruits of his labor are the edition of The Dybbuk and Other Writings by S. Ansky (Yale, 1992) and the book A Bridge of Longing: The Lost Art of Yiddish Storytelling (Harvard, 1995).

[citation needed] A third focus of Roskies' work is The Jewish Search for a Usable Past, the title of a book of related essays published in 1999.