History, we were told in the 1990s, was something that happened to other people. The recent past was littered with code-named police actions that, rendered pointless by the evaporation of the cold war, no longer even had the dignity of the unmentionable. Conservatives kept building monuments to the death of communism that no one wanted to visit. Liberals wanted to forget the whole messy business and gave themselves endless Oscars for movies about World War II. Only fools with sheaves of xeroxed newsletters thought they were smart enough to construct a narrative out of a deafening drone. The more distant past, upon inspection, turned out to be much the same, leading some to suspect that history had never happened at all. There were, however, exceptions to the rule: events taken to be unique in their world-shattering horror and exceptional people who had come near them and gotten away no longer quite themselves. We, too, could be exceptional: if we were good and listened hard, history could become something that happened, though only by proxy, to us. Every year on the Day of Remembrance, survivors came to Hebrew school and asked us to feel on our skin the licks of the Shoah’s eternal flame and to guard with our lives its redemption in the birth of a handsome nation. In history class in regular school, we learned nothing at all. And yet the past kept ghosting through like reruns.