Lives Lived and Lost (PDF)

Kaja Finkler (PhD CUNY) is professor emerita of anthropology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where she had taught for twenty five years. Previously, she taught at Eastern Michigan University. Professor Finkler has published widely in her field: she is the author of five books in her areas of expertise, including her last book Experiencing the New Genetics. Family and Kinship on the Medical Frontier published by the University of Pennsylvania Press, and over fifty articles in refereed journals dealing within her specialties, With Lives Lived and Lost she is drawing on personal experience, with the eye of a participant and observer- informed by her anthropological and ethnographic proficiency. Golda Finkler, born into a prominent rabbinical family, was descended from several Hasidic dynasties, and was immersed in and profoundly knowledgeable about Jewish Orthodox life and Hasidism. She was also a feminist, and studied law in the Wszechnica Polska University in Warsaw at a time when very few women, particularly Orthodox Jewish women, attempted such programs. After surviving World War II ghettos and slave labor camps, she arrived in the United States in 1946. She had an exceptional memory, and this book is largely based on the more than 100 audio tapes she left behind upon her death in 1991 describing her life, the spirituality that helped her resist the Germans and survive the war years.