Piri is a city girl, but every year she goes to visit her grandmother Babi on her farm in the country... The nine stories in this book were inspired by Aranka Siegal's own experiences with her grandmother in the Ukrainian village of Komjaty.

How did Nazi persecution affect the later lives of children and young adolescents? In Light from the Ashes, eighteen eminent social scientists trace the connection between their early wartime experiences and their adult research careers, personality, and values. Autobiographical essays describe their trauma of fleeing from or surviving the Holocaust during childhood or adolescence, and how this influenced their eventual choice of work and general outlook on life. The introductory and closing chapters set these narratives in historical and theoretical context and discuss their broader psychological and social implications. A unique feature of the book is that its contributors were children or adolescents when they became targets of Nazi persecution. Each chapter covers the contributor's experiences during and after the war, his or her professional education, development, and activities, and the perceived connection between those factors. The wider impact of the early years on adult attitudes, political orientation, ethics, religion, family life, important values, and personality characteristics is also discussed. The book will be of primary interest to psychologists and to literary scholars interested in narrative and autobiography. It will be relevant to historians, sociologists, and philosophers of science, especially social science; and to scholars and researchers of all disciplines interested in the impact of traumatic violence, dislocation, war, persecution, and emigration (particularly, but not only, related to the Holocaust) on the subsequent lives of children and adolescents. It will also be valuable to psychologists, psychiatrists, and other scientists working in the field of stress and coping .For the general reader, the book offers the reminiscences of articulate and introspective people who as children experienced a wide variety of adverse circumstances and responded to them--then and later--in a wide variety of mostly adaptive ways. Readers intrigued by first-person narratives of war, persecution, and resilience will find the book of great interest. Peter Suedfeld is Professor of Psychology, University of British Columbia.

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."

"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.

Ivan Jablonka's grandparents' lives ended long before his began: although Matès and Idesa Jablonka were his family, they were perfect strangers. When he set out to uncover their story, Jablonka had little to work with. Neither of them was the least bit famous, and they left little behind except their two orphaned children, a handful of letters, and a passport. Persecuted as communists in Poland, as refugees in France, and then as Jews under the Vichy regime, Matès and Idesa lived their short lives underground. They were overcome by the tragedies of the twentieth century: Stalinism, the mounting dangers in Europe during the 1930s, the Second World War, and the destruction of European Jews. Jablonka's challenge was, as a historian, to rigorously distance himself and yet, as family, to invest himself completely in their story. Imagined oppositions collapsed - between scholarly research and personal commitment, between established facts and the passion of the one recording them, between history and the art of storytelling. To write this book, Jablonka traveled to three continents; met the handful of survivors of his grandparents' era, their descendants, and some of his far-flung cousins; and investigated twenty different archives. And in the process, he reflected on his own family and his responsibilities to his father, the orphaned son, and to his own children and the family wounds they all inherited. A History of the Grandparents I Never Had cannot bring Matès and Idesa to life, but Jablonka succeeds in bringing them, as he soberly puts it, to light. The result is a gripping story, a profound reflection, and an absolutely extraordinary history.

A writer's lifelong battle with mental illness. Demonic to Divine: The Double Life of Shulamis Yelin is a weaving of the Montreal writer's stories and selected diary excerpts and family photographs revealing a far-reaching creative personality who is haunted from the age of ten by the "moods taking over." This book poignantly illuminates the dramatic duality of a public and private literary and emotional life through published and unpublished stories of an idyllic Montreal Jewish childhood contrasted with deeply troubled and often shocking diary entries that document the author's lifelong battle with mental illness. Yelin's insightful yet light and humorous stories have been cherished by generations of children and adults for their universal appeal. The journal entries that she maintained for most of her 90 years document the abuse, paranoia, self-loathing, doubt, and devastating depression of Yelin's true emotional state. These concurrent lenses reveal the profound struggles and suffering of a fascinating and highly gifted woman who transcended her ongoing deep-seated emotional agony to create a significant literary legacy. The many threads of this multilayered book have been woven together though the collaboration of Yelin's daughter, Gilah Yelin Hirsch and Yelin's first stories' editor, Nancy Marrelli.

An account written by Tubach of his own life experiences and those of his friend, Bernat Rosner, as related to him. Rosner, a Holocaust survivor, was born in 1932 in the village of Tab, Hungary. Tubach, a non-Jew, was born in 1930 as Friedrich (Fritz) Tubach, and grew up in the village of Kleinheubach, Franconia. After the war, Tubach and Rosner both immigrated to the USA, where they met and became friends. Their wartime stories are interwoven in the book. In July 1944, after the German occupation of Hungary, Rosner and his family were deported to Auschwitz. In September 1944 Rosner was sent to Mauthausen, and then to Gusen and Gunskirchen. His parents and brother perished in Auschwitz. Rosner created a new American identity for himself, and it was only in the 1990s that he and Tubach began to record their conversations on their lives in wartorn Europe. Tubach also relates the fate of some Jews of Kleinheubach and describes the "Kristallnacht" pogrom in the village.

Upon arriving at the kibbutz, after years of running and living in a constant state of fear and anxiety, I finally felt that I could unburden my heart and mind. I had dreamed of the day I would arrive, alive, in Eretz Israel. The constant stress of the last few years was made easier by my constant desire to achieve that goal. So, when I first arrived in the kibbutz dining hall, it was as if all my dreams had come true. David J. Azrieli was born in 1922 in Maków Mazowiecki, Poland. Written by his daughter Danna, this gripping account of survival during World War II describes David’s extraordinary travels, always just one step ahead of life-threatening danger, which took him to the Soviet-occupied zones of Poland and later to Ukraine, Tashkent, and Buchara. He subsequently served in the Anders Army, before making his way from Baghdad to the frontiers of British-occupied Palestine. The memoir chronicles David J. Azrieli’s arrival in Palestine, his studies at the Technion in Haifa, his experiences as a soldier in the War of Independence, and his realization that most of his immediate family had perished in the Holocaust. Azrieli finally settled in Canada in 1954. There he married his wife, Stephanie, and together they raised four children—Rafi, Sharon, Naomi, and Danna. This story of survival is all the more remarkable given Azrieli’s later achievements as a successful real estate developer and philanthropist. One of the economic giants of the Jewish world, his many developments changed the face of Israel and stand as a striking testament to the strength and courage of a boy whom Hitler could not defeat. The highlight of his activities is the establishment of the Canadian and Israeli Azrieli Foundations, which focus on improving the lives of present and future generations through education, research, healthcare, and arts. -- page 4 of cover.

Book by Porter, Jack Nusan

Ethel Hofman grew up in the only Jewish family on Shetland. This is the story of her family and childhood, and of the meeting of two diverse cultures in a unique landscape. Fleeing Russia a century ago, Ethel's father, Harry Greenwald, found a safe haven in Lerwick, Shetland. Liking the place, he brought over Jean after an arranged marriage and they set up a shop, Greenvald's, soon popular with the locals as a gathering place. Despite the hardships of living on a remote island, good food and good company were always available, and the recipes for the Jewish and island dishes prepared by Jean are woven throughout the touching, affectionate narrative. As a unique blend of memoir and cookbook, Mackerel at Midnight shows how food can strengthen family and cultural bonds, and celebrates the tolerance and warmth of one Jewish family and the community that embraced them.

At last, Ruth Sidranksy’s groundbreaking book In Silence: Growing Up Hearing in a Deaf World is back in print. Her account of growing up as the hearing daughter of deaf Jewish parents in the Bronx and Brooklyn during the 1930s and1940s reveals the challenges deaf people faced during the Depression and afterward. Inside her family’s apartment, Sidransky knew a warm, secure place. She recalls her earliest memories of seeing words fall from her parents’ hands. She remembers her father entertaining the family endlessly with his stories, and her mother’s story of tying a red ribbon to herself and her infant daughter to know when she needed anything in the night. Outside the apartment, the cacophonous hearing world greeted Sidransky’s family with stark stares of curiosity as though they were “freaks.” Always upbeat, her proud father still found it hard to earn a living. When Sidransky started school, she was placed in a class for special needs children until the principal realized that she could hear and speak. Sidransky portrays her family with deep affection and honesty, and her frank account provides a living narrative of the Deaf experience in pre- and post-World War II America. In Silence has become an invaluable chronicle of a special time and place that will affect all who read it for years to come.

"[Marshall] understands that the neighborhoods and cities that no longer exist can be conjured by memory and reanimated by art."-- San Francisco Chronicle "Born in Brooklyn of Arabic/Jewish heritage, Marshall may represent the keynote, most critical multicultural mixture of our time."--Naomi Shihab Nye, Hungry Mind Review Inspired by the posthumous discovery of letters written by his father but never mailed, Jack Marshall's memoir is both a moving story of a writer's artistic coming-of-age and a lush, lyrical recollection of a childhood spent in Brooklyn's Arabic-speaking Jewish community. Born in 1936 to an Iraqi father and Syrian mother who had immigrated to the United States, Marshall grew up in the hardworking Sephardic community--enveloped in an extended family that spoke little English, no Yiddish, and whose way of life owed more to their Middle Eastern homelands than to European Jewish traditions. As the sights, sounds, and tastes of midcentury New York leap off the page, Marshall beautifully evokes the magic of youth and discovery. From playing "running bases" in the Brooklyn streets to making egg creams at Coney Island, from his mother's rich kibbeh and baklava to the vast world revealed in the books of the New York Public Library, from the pleasures of music to the mysteries contained under a microscope, Marshall's story is as enduring as it is original. And before he sets sail for Africa as a seaman on a Norwegian freighter, Marshall has, through his negotiation of language, culture, family strife, and issues of education, faith, and politics, shined a light upon the possibilities of our collective future. A critically acclaimed poet, Jack Marshall has received a PEN Center USA West Award, two Bay Area Book Reviewers awards, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The Watchmaker's Daughter tells the story of a child of two refugees: a watchmaker who saved lives within Dachau prison, and his wife, a gifted concert pianist about to make her debut when the Nazis seized power. In this memoir, Sonia Taitz is born into a world in which the Holocaust is discussed constantly by her insular concentration camp-surviving parents. This legacy, combined with Sonia's passion and intelligence, leads the author to forge an adventurous life in which she seeks to heal both her parents and herself through travel, achievement, and a daring love affair. Ironically, it is her marriage to a non-Jew that brings her parents the peace and fulfillment they would never have imagined possible. Sonia manages to combine her own independence with a tender dutifulness, honoring her parents' legacy while forging a new family of her own.

Paul Salomon was a successful Hamburg bank director until 1933. He achieved prosperity within the span of a few years, bought a handsome house in Hamburg-Harvestehude and was able to afford his children a carefree youth almost. In this book, his son Ernest H. Sanders (olim Helmut Salomon), who emigrated to New York in 1938, gives an account of the fate of his family in Germany. The transformation from a normal civil life to at first unacknowledged persecution, resulting in the suicide of both parents on 21st September 1941, is recounted in a subtle and moving way. In spite of these painful experiences, Sanders retained a close connection to Hamburg, his native city, as is evident in his gratitude towards his school, the Johanneum, and especially towards his classmates, who enabled him to take his school leaving examination in spite of orders to the contrary thereby laying the foundation for a future in the United States.

"From a childhood in London's East End to half a century in New Zealand photographing wine-makers, artists, children and kuia, Marti Friedlander has lived a rich life, one defined by the art of looking. In Self-portrait, Marti tells her story for the first time. As forthright and revealing in words as in her photographs, she tells of growing up in London orphanages, being Jewish, working in a Kensington photography studio, marrying a New Zealander and moving across the world to a challenging new country. Here she began to photograph the ordinary and the extraordinary, protests and politicians, balloons and beaches, capturing on film the transformation of New Zealand life over more than fifty years. This book is a rich meditation on one women's photographic journey through the twentieth century."--Publisher's information.