dr fishman you're right narrative history is very different from academic prose and even though i'm very experienced with the latter i think this is a particularly good example of the former - to the point where i 100% thought this was a mass market book for a lay audience until about five seconds ago. if the dialogue and thoughts recorded in this book are all sourced from archival materials, ghetto diaries, and interviews, then this truly is a tour de force.

will say, though, that it's always weird to read a book that prominently features 20th century jewishness and judaism in 2024 solely due to the (both historical and contemporaneous) conflations of zionism and jewishness. i'm not the best person to speak on any of this but Huh.