Tec, Nechama. Resilience and Courage: Women, Men, and the Holocaust. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. 354 pp.

by Sally West

Resilience and Courage is sociologist Nechama Tec's fifth book about the Holocaust, but the first that has focused primarily on gender. Her quest was to discover the ways in which gender affected experiences of and responses to the Holocaust. A survivor herself, Tec maintains the delicate balance between a scholar's open-minded inquiry and a victim's empathy. In addition to drawing on published sources and archival material, her research emphasizes interviews conducted over ten years in six languages and several countries. She often confronted her subjects' initial esitation to consider the factor of gender, since the Nazis
destroyed men and women alike. For many interviewees, this was the first time they had asked themselves whether women responded differently from men to the persecutions. And yet, with remarkable consistency, individuals' memories corroborated emerging patterns of difference.