How do people rebuild their lives after unimaginable upheaval—and what stories do they tell along the way? In this episode, Rabbi Marc Katz sits down with author Philip Boris Uninsky to discuss his deeply personal and revealing book, Invented Lives from Troubled Times: A Jewish Family’s Forms of Resilience after Surviving Pogroms, Revolution, and the Holocaust (Cherry Orchard Books, 2025).
Blending family memory with archival research, Uninsky traces the story of an extended Jewish family that endured some of the twentieth century’s most devastating events—pogroms, revolution, and the Holocaust. But rather than focusing only on loss, the book explores resilience in all its complexity. Family memories, sometimes shaped by exaggeration, humor, misdirection, and reinvention, reveal how survivors crafted new identities in the aftermath of trauma.
Through decades of research and personal observation, Uninsky uncovers a remarkable range of responses to survival. Some family members became quiet, responsible citizens; others lived eccentrically, defiantly, or even recklessly. Together, their lives challenge the assumption that trauma leads only to brokenness. Instead, the book paints a vivid portrait of persistence, adaptability, and the many surprising ways people rebuild meaning after catastrophe.
Together, Uninsky and Katz explore the fragile boundary between memory and invention, the role of storytelling in survival, and what resilience really looks like across generations shaped by violence and displacement.
About the Guest
For over three decades, Philip B. Uninsky has brought science and law to service in the US and Africa. An academic social scientist, attorney, and director of non-profits, he has supported highly stressed communities by implementing, evaluating, and sustaining evidence-based models in the areas of mental health, trauma, education, and violence prevention.
About the Host
Marc Katz is the rabbi of Temple Ner Tamid and the author of several books on Jewish thought and the Talmud. Through his teaching, writing, and podcast conversations with scholars and storytellers, Katz brings history, memory, and Jewish experience into conversation with contemporary life.
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