"Conversion and Catastropheis a unique volume which sheds illuminating light on the deep questions of religious conversion among Jews of German descent. Abraham Rubin uses the memoirs and novels and journalism of four German-Jewish refugees to reveal their tortured yet sophisticated attempts to create some sort of authentic identity after the war. Rubin uses all possible sources to reveal hidden meanings, silences, hypocrisies, loneliness, and poverty in their difficult lives. Rubin's alert readings reveal how socialism, art, Zionism, and cosmopolitan internationalism all failed to provide these refugees with inner serenity in the worst of times."--Deborah Hertz, Herman Wouk Chair in Modern Jewish Studies, University of California San Diego "How do we tell the stories of our lives? In this fascinating study of German-Jewish autobiographies, Abraham Rubin examines the narratives of Jews who escaped Nazi Germany and who left Judaism, converting to Christianity. What they tell us in their memoirs and what they hid from their readers becomes a remarkable story of home, flight, betrayal, and, at times, rebirth."--Susannah Heschel, Eli M. Black Distinguished Professor, Dartmouth College "Rubin considers the autobiographies of Jewish converts to Christianity in the shadow of the Third Reich as a distinctive genre of literature, which he probes with a hermeneutic informed by an elegant weave of literary criticism and socio-psychological analysis.

He concludes that while the conversion narratives attest to their protagonists' abnegation of their ancestral faith community, these individuals continued to be haunted by the racial and religious stigma of their ethnic provenance. This book is a masterful contribution to the study of German-Jewish cultural history, Holocaust memory, and the psychodynamics of identity construction."--Paul Mendes-Flohr, Dorothy Grant Maclear Professor Emeritus of Modern Jewish History and Thought, University of Chicago, and Professor Emeritus, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem "Rubin offers a piercing examination of how faith, persecution, and self-reinvention converge in the lives of four German-Jewish exiles who converted to Christianity during the Nazi years. In evocative prose, Rubin's masterful narrative compels us to confront the complexities of conversion for a generation navigating political cataclysm. Above all, it invites us into a dialogue about the nature of memory, survival, and self-definition amid the ruins of history."--Vivian Liska, author of German-Jewish Thought and Its Afterlife: A Tenuous Legacy.