Invented Lives from Troubled Times offers a fresh perspective on the complex pathways to resilience, recounting the saga of an extended Jewish family who survived decades of repeated, severe traumas in the 20th century. In addition to exploring his family’s recounted memories, which were clothed with confabulations, misdirection, and droll inventiveness, Uninsky uses archival sources and decades of observations and interactions to uncover their diverse and shifting pathways to persistence. These survivors were not, as is often predicted, ineluctably diminished by profound trauma and the...