Day 16: "Memory's Cellar"

James McAuley (Liberties, Autumn 2023)

In this twenty-two-day series, we are counting down the days to publication (October 22, 2024) with a brief passage from each of the twenty-two essays included in The Best American Essays 2024. These excerpts were curated by Best American Essays Editorial Assistant Cheyenne Paterson and are presented in the order of the volume’s table of contents.

“We do not always get to choose the questions that we ask of the past, or the questions that the past asks of us. But we can ask why those questions are posed in the first place, why they are formulated in the way they are, and perhaps most importantly, what their place in our lives should be. I cannot remember a time when I was not aware of the Holocaust, when its shadow was not somehow a funda- mental part of how I understood the world and—as perverse and as sad as this is—of how I understood my own Jewishness.”

—James McAuley, “Memory’s Cellar,” Liberties, Autumn 2023.