New Books Network Philip Boris Uninsky, "Invented Lives from Troubled Times: A Jewish Family’s Forms of Resilience after Surviving Pogroms, Revolution, and the Holocaust" (Cherry Orchard Books, 2025)
Apr 4, 2026
Philip B. Uninsky, an academic social scientist, attorney, and nonprofit director, recounts his extended Jewish family’s survival across pogroms, revolution, and the Holocaust. He explores memory’s slipperiness and creative nonfiction methods. Short portraits reveal diverse, surprising forms of resilience. Conversations probe secrecy, reinvention, and why some stayed while others left.
AI Snips
Chapters
Books
Transcript
Episode notes
Trauma Produces Diverse Reinventions Not A Single Fate
- Trauma doesn't produce a single predictable outcome; Uninsky observed wide, vibrant diversity of post-trauma lives across one extended family.
- Over 40 years he tracked asynchronous memories and behaviors showing resilience took many distinct, reinventive forms rather than flattening lives.
Creative Nonfiction As Method For Confabulated Memory
- Uninsky framed the book as creative nonfiction because memories were asynchronous, thematic, and often confabulated rather than strictly chronological.
- He organized chapters by themes (language, gift, humor, religion) to map patterns of resilience when archival facts were sparse.
How Alexander Uninsky Rebuilt A Global Piano Career
- Alexander Uninsky, born Kiev 1910, fled to Paris, entered Conservatoire at 14 and won the 1932 Chopin Prize, launching a meteoric piano career.
- He escaped wartime Europe by bicycling toward Spain/Portugal, reached Argentina, then rebuilt fame across Latin America and Europe.
