A somewhat harrowing account of a Jewish girl who left Czechoslovakia in the 1940s and relocated in England as a refugee.

"I had to do something to escape Hitler's clutches," writes Esti Freud. Yet she waits with her then-16-year-old daughter, Sophie in Paris, until German canons can be heard in the distance, before deciding to escape by bicycle across France as Sophie keeps looking back to see whether German tanks will overtake them. Both women survive by sheer miracle and, in their own ways, come to feel a need to keep a personal record of those tumultuous times. In a memoir written at age 79, Esti Freud, daughter-in-law of Sigmund Freud and wife of his oldest son Martin, looks back on her life that began before the 20th century, was lived on three continents, and stretched through two world wars and the Holocaust. Twenty years after her mother's death, daughter Sophie turned to Esti's memoir as a scaffold for this book, expanding it through family letters and archival material. Out of these documents the author has created a fascinating, many-voiced mosaic--the story of a famous family and of a century seen through the eyes of many characters. Indomitable Esti was not an easy person to love. While she establishes herself professionally three times, in three different languages, her troubled family relationships leave her lonely, often deeply unhappy. Sophie confides that Esti died without son or daughter at her side. This work gives an insider's, in-law view of the family Freud, its foundations, and flaws. The relationship between Esti, daughter of a wealthy Vienna attorney and her husband Martin Freud is foreshadowed by the young lovers' fathers. At first meeting Esti, Sigmund told his son the glamorous woman was "too beautiful" for the clan, meaning her splendor belied a lifestyle not conducive to the frugal Freud ways. And Esti's father, on hearing of her love for Martin, expressed regret she was involved with a man who was "not a financially favorable linkage," and that his family was not respectable since patriarch Sigmund was "just another psychiatrist, and one who writes pornography books at that." Thus begins the ill-fated relationship that would rock two families and a generation of children to come. Sophie weaves into the text letters she inherited, including letters from Martin while he was a prisoner of war, and excerpts from her own diary, kept as an adolescent. The resulting mosaic will fascinate--and perhaps disturb--readers interested in Freud and psychoanalysis, as well as those intrigued by relationships and family.

A survivor of Auschwitz recounts his harrowing experiences, his adjustment to freedom, and his work on behalf of the Jewish cause

Memoirs of a Jew who was born in 1927 in Borisław, Poland. Pp. 31-132 deal with the Holocaust period, based on information found in a diary she kept at the time. Wolanski survived in hiding, at first with a Christian family and then in a bunker in the forest, until the liberation.

Traveling Heavy is a deeply moving, unconventional memoir by the master storyteller and cultural anthropologist Ruth Behar. Through evocative stories, she portrays her life as an immigrant child and later, as an adult woman who loves to travel but is terrified of boarding a plane. With an open heart, she writes about her Yiddish-Sephardic-Cuban-American family, as well as the strangers who show her kindness as she makes her way through the world. Compassionate, curious, and unafraid to reveal her failings, Behar embraces the unexpected insights and adventures of travel, whether those be learning that she longed to become a mother after being accused of giving the evil eye to a baby in rural Mexico, or going on a zany pilgrimage to the Behar World Summit in the Spanish town of Béjar. Behar calls herself an anthropologist who specializes in homesickness. Repeatedly returning to her homeland of Cuba, unwilling to utter her last goodbye, she is obsessed by the question of why we leave home to find home. For those of us who travel heavy with our own baggage, Behar is an indispensable guide, full of grace and hope, in the perpetual search for connection that defines our humanity.

Pauline Wengeroff, the only nineteenth-century Russian Jewish woman to publish a memoir, sets out to illuminate the "cultural history of the Jews of Russia" in the period of Jewish "enlightenment," when traditional culture began to disintegrate and Jews became modern. Wengeroff, a gifted writer and astute social observer, paints a rich portrait of both traditional and modernizing Jewish societies in an extraordinary way, focusing on women and the family and offering a gendered account (and indictment) of assimilation. In Volume 1 of Memoirs of a Grandmother, Wengeroff depicts traditional Jewish society, including the religious culture of women, during the reign of Tsar Nicholas I, who wished "his" Jews to be acculturated to modern Russian life.Pauline Wengeroff's Memoirs of a Grandmother offers a unique first-person window into traditionalism, modernity, and the tensions linking the two in nineteenth-century Russia. Wengeroff (1833–1916), a perceptive, highly literate social observer, tells a gripping tale of cultural transformation, situating her narrative in the experience of women and families. In Volume Two, Wengeroff claims that Jewish women were capable and desirous of adopting the best of European modernity but were also wedded to tradition, while Jewish men recklessly abandoned tradition and forced their wives to do the same. The result was not only marital and intergenerational conflict but also catastrophic cultural loss, with women's inability to transmit tradition in the home leading to larger cultural drift. Two of Wengeroff's children converted when faced with anti-Jewish educational and professional discrimination, unwilling to sacrifice secular ambitions and visions for the sake of a traditional culture they did not know. Memoirs is a tale of loss but also of significant hope, which Wengeroff situates not in her children but in a new generation of Jewish youth reclaiming Jewish memory. To them, she addresses her Memoirs, giving an "orphaned youth"―orphaned of their past and culture―a "grandmother."

"Journal entries help chronicle the experiences Mihail Sebastian had while living in Romania during the fascist years."

Greenman was born in 1910 in London to a Jewish family; in 1913 he and his widowed father settled in Rotterdam. Greenman failed to escape to England when the war began, and in 1940 was caught by the German occupation. He lost his British identity papers and, because of bureaucratic procrastination on the part of Dutch officials and of the Swiss consulate that represented British interests, could not prove his British nationality. He was deported to Westerbork in October 1942, with his wife and son. In January 1943 the family was sent to Birkenau, where Greenman's wife and child were killed immediately, and he was used for slave labor. He was also a victim of "medical experiments" in the camp. In September 1943 he was transferred to the Monowitz camp, and in January 1945, after a death march to Gleiwitz, he was transported to Buchenwald, where he was liberated. After the war he settled in Britain. His father survived, since he was married to a non-Jew.

Notes from the Other Side of Night is a diary-memoir written upon Juliana Geran Pilon's return to her native Romania in 1975, which she had left along with her family when she was just fourteen. Poetically weaving together modern insight and realities with childhood perceptions, Pilon tells the haunting stories of her parents, grandparents, neighbors, and friends. Although the scenery of her native home had remained essentially unchanged since her childhood, Pilon recalls streets that are no more, homes and churches that have been demolished. Yet, the hills and forests, the flowers and mountains, the heat of old Bucharest, remained the same. The scenes and characters described in this book are simply unforgettable. Despite the many tragedies it describes--anti-semitism, political imprisonment, and judicial execution were ruthless realities under communism--Notes from the Other Side of Night is not a depressing book. Pilon writes with a detached melancholy about events and characters that illustrate Hannah Arendt's terrifying "banality of evil." But she remembers, as well, those few who managed to remain human beings until the end. Ultimately, hope triumphs in this memoir. This edition includes a new foreword, which discusses the initial writing and publication of this and previous editions.

Beginning with the first Jewish settler, Moses David, the important role that Windsor Jews played in the development of Ontario's south is mirrored in this 200-year chronicle. the founding pioneer families transformed their Eastern European shtetl into a North American settlement; many individuals were involved in establishing synagogues, schools, and an organized communal structure in spite of divergent religious, political, and economic interests. Modernity and the growing influences of Zionism and Conservative/Reform Judaism challenged the traditional and leftist leanings of the community's founders. From the outset, Jews were represented in city council, actively involved in communal organizations, and appointed to judicial posts. While its Jewish population was small, Windsor boasted Canada's first Jewish Cabinet members, provincially and federally, in David Croll and Herb Gray. As the new millennium approached, jews faced shrinking numbers, forcing major consolidations in order to ensure their survival.

'In the Lower Saxony region of northwestern Germany sits the city of Osnabrück. This is where, in 1648, the Peace of Westphalia was signed, bringing the Thirty Years' War and one of the most calamitous periods of European history to an end. But the city was later to witness another calamity. Today, as one walks through Old Synagogue Street in a rich neighborhood of Osnabrück, one might miss noticing a pile of pale stones held together by chicken wire that sits between two fashionable homes. These are the well-kept ruins from behind which stares a gaping space--a place of memory and oblivion. Four polished plaques tell the tale of the horror-filled night of November 9, 1938--today known as Kristallnacht--when the synagogue that had stood on this spot was desecrated, looted, set on fire, and eventually demolished by Hitler's forces. On the same day, ninety parishioners were imprisoned by the Gestapo and eventually sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp. Osnabrück was also home to Eve Klein, a member of the city's early-twentieth-century Jewish community and the mother of author Hélène Cixous. In Well-Kept Ruins, Cixous returns to the historic city in 2019 and reflects on the remains of the synagogue that "express the life lost, the life kept." Walking the streets of the city, plumbing the depths of the past along with her own family's history, looking deep into the future, and punctuating her poetic prose with haunting photographs, Cixous explores the ruins at the heart of humanity. Part memoir, part philosophical meditation, Well-Kept Ruins is a genre-defying and timely reflection of the contemporary human condition.'--Publisher description.

15 March 1939: German troops enter Prague and for Czechoslovakian Jews the terror begins. This is the story of one of the survivors. Helen Lewis was a young wife studying philosophy and attending a prestigious school of dance in Prague. In 1942 she and her husband Paul were deported to Terezin, the Jewish ghetto, and then to Auschwitz, where they were separated. A Time to Speak is the story of her survival. Told with impeccable integrity, there is wit and candor in her tale as well as sorrow, and a controlled anger, which never diplays itself in rancor. This is a memorable book of love and loss, friendship and betrayal, terror and humor, joy and despair, good and evil, death and survival. Helen Lewis does not speculate, she never invents. This is only truth, witnessed truth.