Jeffrey Katz has found a way to add something revelatory and powerful to the vast literature of the Holocaust. With a reporter’s eye for detail and a passionate drive for stories that tell larger truths, he has produced a heart-rending history of his Jewish family’s journey in and out of acceptance in pre-war Germany. He has returned to the homeland that rejected—and murdered—so many of his kinsmen, not so much to revisit the scars of genocide, but to understand those who have dedicated themselves to breaking their fellow Germans’ silence about the Shoah. In the endless battle between the quest to remember and the human need to forget, Katz pushes to find what really drives people to dig among the shadows of a past that still hides so much pain.

Jeffrey Katz has given us an engaging and sensitive account of two worlds moving hesitantly toward each other via the past of his Jewish ancestors from two villages and two cities in Germany. As he belatedly uncovers their history, descendants of their persecutors try to face up to it, too. This is a remarkably balanced and human portrait of the benefits and limits of reconciliation over time and space.

Who are the German ‘memory activists’ who resurrect the stories of Jews the Nazis murdered, and do so not out of collective guilt, but a kind of righteous shame? Jeffrey Katz finds in the unsettled ground of the book’s title a common ground with these truth-tellers, who just might reclaim the phrase “ordinary Germans.” At the same time, Katz deftly takes up larger, knottier questions of public history and collective remembrance in this courageous, nuanced, and generous book. And he shares enough of himself to deliver that richest of hybrids—a reported memoir with the sweep of historical saga.

If we mean it when we say, ‘Never again!’ we have to remember what happened to German Jews. The numbers—6 million—convey the enormity of the slaughter, but only the stories of individuals move us. They remind us that we offspring of German Jews who survived have a particular obligation to stand up today when tyrants threaten other peoples. Jeffrey Katz tells his family's story with detail and passion and eloquently celebrates the efforts of many Germans who are helping Jews recover the stories of our ancestors and labor to make sure that Germany never forgets.

Jeffrey Katz has used his journalistic skills of digging into the past to write Unsettled Ground. He’s created a fascinating glimpse of what it was like to live in small towns in Germany as a Jew before and during World War II and put Holocaust history into perspective in our tumultuous present day. Bravo! I could not put it down.

This is a moving journey to discover how generations of German citizens have tried to accept and make sense of the lasting damage done to their country by the dozen years of National Socialism is both timely and timeless. The term Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung (coming to terms with the past) may not trip off the tongue, but it holds badly needed lessons for us all.