When Simon Dubnow was invited to contribute to the first volume of the Yiddish-language Historishe shriftn (published in 1929), he submitted a piece on the 18th-century Jewish catastrophe in Uman. The article, an essay accompanying two annotated versions of Jewish folk chronicles on the massacre, was written in 1921 in the wake of the Ukrainian pogroms of the previous year that left as many as 70,000 Jews dead. The tone of Dubnow's essay was pained, passionate and uncompromising. He used his scholarly platform to minimize the importance of social, economic or political considerations in understanding the causes of any of the three major Ukrainian massacres of Jews, a puzzling stance for Dubnow since he was European Jewry’ s leading advocate of historicism. Yet he stated that the Khmelnitsky pogroms of 1648, the Uman massacre and the recent devastations following World War I were part of a continuous, seamless saga: ‘When we look at these catastrophes, which have erupted one after the other every 120-150 years, one sees in them the same exact picture.’ The tools of historical analysis, he seemed to be saying, are impotent when confronted with such unremitting horror. One is left merely to chronicle, mourn and rage.

Reactions to catastrophe such as Dubnow's, observes David G. Roskies in Against the Apocalypse, with their tendency to concentrate on the cyclical nature of horror, are harmful and yet very persuasive. Indeed, the tendency to understand catastrophe along these lines is deeply embedded in the Jewish consciousness, he contends. Such responses may be traced back to rabbinical liturgical poetry and even earlier; they continue to shape Jewish literary reactions to catastrophe to the present day.

Roskies sets out to challenge this. In his ambitious, rich and profoundly engaged book, he proposes that running parallel to such trends in Jewish cultural life is an alternative tradition as embodied most vividly in the ‘neoclassical’ writings of Yiddish literature. These writings challenge, deny and transcend the apocalyptic vision of the Jewish past and future. The neo classicist writers, says Roskies, are engaged in the retrieval of a usable past for the sake of a reconstructed Jewry.