A literary scholar examines survival narratives from Russian and German concentration camps, shedding new light on testimony in the face of evil. In this illuminating study, Leona Toker demonstrates how Holocaust literature and Gulag literature provide contexts for each other, especially how the prominent features of one shed light on the veiled features and methods of the other. Toker’s analysis concentrates on the narrative qualities of the works as well as how each text documents the writer’s experience in a form where fictionalized narrative can double as historical testimony. Toker also views these texts against the background of historical information about the Soviet and the Nazi regimes of repression. Writers at the center of this work include Varlam Shalamov, Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, and Ka-Tzetnik, and others, including Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Evgeniya Ginzburg, and Jorge Semprún, illuminate the discussion. Toker also provides context for references to potentially obscure historical events and shows how they form new meaning in the text.

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Toward the end of my life, I am enjoying the opportunity of revisiting some of my early days of involvement in ministry before ordained ministry became my life. I was early affected by race, poverty, justice, and ministry to children where these were issues. These issues stayed with me throughout my ordained ministry. Early in my community service, I learned that people involved in offering services to those in need are not able to simply go forth and do good deeds. Financial and political powers have too often become goals in and of themselves rather than a means to accomplishing much good. That "early learning" prompted me to move in the direction of ordained parish ministry as my field of operation in life. Finding My Field seeks to share a few of my migrant ministry experiences that helped me make these discoveries about real life.