 A sample of characteristic essays written over three decades, from the early 1920s to the late 1940s, was published in Gestalten und Kreise (Figures and Circles, 1954, hereafter GK). The essay collection conveys the themes Susman was principally preoccupied with as well as her approach to essay writing. Susman’s Das Buch Hiob und das Schicksal des jüdischen Volkes (The Book of Job and the Destiny of the Jewish People, 1946) was one of the earliest attempts at responding to the catastrophic events of the Shoah and the challenge they posed to the very meaning of being Jewish after the genocidal annihilation of European Jewry. In this book, Susman argues that, like the Book of Job had suggested, the question of meaning was ultimately not to be answered by any rationalization of human loss and suffering through the invocation of a grander scheme but was instead to be approached by acknowledging the impossibility of grasping the unfathomable and comprehending meaning as the continuous project of human existence whose temporality comes into focus only from the viewpoint of a future yet to be realized.