Of the multitudinous characters who populate the seven volumes of In Search of Lost Time, all indelibly depicted, none is more elusive in the end than the one we know the most about, whether we think of him as Proust himself or “the Narrator.” There is an “uncertainty” seemingly built into the narrative structure of the novel, the first and most significant of several that the acclaimed Israeli historian of the Holocaust Saul Friedländer explores in this brilliant extended essay on Proust and his masterpiece. I call it an essay—as does the author—because, though richly documented, it maintains a genial, pleasingly conversational tone throughout; for all its scholarship this is not an academic treatise but a deeply personal meditation on Proust and his great work. Friedländer makes this unmistakably clear in his concluding remarks.

It is refreshing to read a historian’s response to Proust rather than that of a literary critic. After all, what does a historian do but excavate “lost time” in an effort to recover what seems irrecoverable and to give us not just the facts of the past but—in the case of the best historians—the actual feel of a vanished time in all its sensuous specificity? Thus, there is little discussion here of Proust’s purely literary strategies and effects. Though Friedländer praises Proust’s prose, at once sinuous and ornate, he is not interested in subjecting it to prolonged stylistic analysis. Rather, like Proust, he is a navigator of memory. He calls Proust’s great work