Author: Rebecca Boehling
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107377692
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 351
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Book Description
A family's recently discovered correspondence provides the inspiration for this fascinating and deeply moving account of Jewish family life before, during and after the Holocaust. Rebecca Boehling and Uta Larkey reveal how the Kaufmann-Steinberg family was pulled apart under the Nazi regime and dispersed over three continents. The family's unique eight-way correspondence across two generations brings into sharp focus the dilemma of Jews in Nazi Germany facing the painful decisions of when, if and to where they should emigrate. The authors capture the family members' fluctuating emotions of hope, optimism, resignation and despair as well as the day-to-day concerns, experiences and dynamics of family life despite increasing persecution and impending deportation. Headed by two sisters who were among the first female business owners in Essen, the family was far from conventional and their story contributes new dimensions to our understanding of Jewish life in Germany and in exile during these dark years.
Author: Vaddey Ratner
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1849837619
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 436
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Book Description
A stunning, powerful debut novel set against the backdrop of the Cambodian War, perfect for fans of Chris Cleave and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie For seven-year-old Raami, the shattering end of childhood begins with the footsteps of her father returning home in the early dawn hours bringing details of the civil war that has overwhelmed the streets of Phnom Penh, Cambodia's capital. Soon the family's world of carefully guarded royal privilege is swept up in the chaos of revolution and forced exodus. Over the next four years, as she endures the deaths of family members, starvation, and brutal forced labour, Raami clings to the only remaining vestige of childhood - the mythical legends and poems told to her by her father. In a climate of systematic violence where memory is sickness and justification for execution, Raami fights for her improbable survival. Displaying the author's extraordinary gift for language, In the Shadow of the Banyanis testament to the transcendent power of narrative and a brilliantly wrought tale of human resilience. 'In the Shadow of the Banyanis one of the most extraordinary and beautiful acts of storytelling I have ever encountered' Chris Cleave, author of The Other Hand 'Ratner is a fearless writer, and the novel explores important themes such as power, the relationship between love and guilt, and class. Most remarkably, it depicts the lives of characters forced to live in extreme circumstances, and investigates how that changes them. To read In the Shadow of the Banyan is to be left with a profound sense of being witness to a tragedy of history' Guardian 'This is an extraordinary debut … as beautiful as it is heartbreaking' Mail on Sunday
Author: Frieda E. Roos-van Hessen
Publisher: Harvest Day Books
ISBN: 9780974134581
Category : Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)
Languages : en
Pages : 222
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Book Description
Author: Ilana Rosen
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
ISBN: 9780814331293
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 284
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Book Description
A compassionate and insightful study of Hungarian women who lived through the Holocaust, with an appendix containing their complete stories. Sister in Sorrow offers a glimpse into the world of Hungarian Holocaust survivors through the stories of fifteen survivors, as told by thirteen women and two spouses presently living in Hungary and Israel. Analyzing the accounts as oral narratives, author Ilana Rosen uses contemporary folklore studies methodologies to explore the histories and the consciousness of the narrators as well as the difficulty for present-day audiences to fully grasp them. Rosen's research demonstrates not only the extreme personal horrors these women experienced but also the ways they cope with their memories. In four sections, Rosen interprets the life histories according to two major contemporary leading literary approaches: psychoanalysis and phenomenology. This reading encompasses both the life spans of the survivors and specific episodes or personal narratives relating to the women's identity and history. The psychoanalytic reading examines focal phases in the lives of the women, first in pre-war Europe, then in World War II and the Holocaust, and last as Holocaust survivors living in the shadow of loss and atrocity. The phenomenological examination traces the terms of perception and of the communication between the women and their different present-day non-survivor audiences. An appendix contains the complete life histories of the women, including their unique and affecting remembrances. Although Holocaust memory and narrative have figured at the center of academic, political, and moral debates in recent years, most works look at such stories from a social science perspective and attempt to extend the meaning of individual tales to larger communities. Although Rosen keeps the image of the general group--be it Jews, female Holocaust survivors, Israelis, or Hungarians--in mind throughout this volume, the focus of Sister in Sorrow is the ways the individual women experienced, told, and processed their harrowing experiences. Students of Holocaust studies and women's studies will be grateful for the specific and personal approach of Sister in Sorrow.
Author: Karen Baum Gordon
Publisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press
ISBN: 1621907031
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 317
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Book Description
"Part of the Legacies of War series, The Last Letter is a family memoir that spans events from the 1930s and Hitler's rise to power, through World War II and the Holocaust, to the present-day United States. Karen Baum Gordon's gripping narrative opens on her father Rudy Baum's attempted suicide in 2002 at the age of eight-six and unfolds in an investigation of generational trauma within her extensive German Jewish family. Gordon grounds her research in eighty-eight letters written mostly by Julie Baum, Rudy's mother and Gordon's grandmother, to Rudy between November 1936 and October 1941. Gordon examines pieces of these worn, handwritten letters and other archival documents in order to recreate the fatal journeys of her grandparents in the camps and ghettos of the Third Reich and trace her father's efforts to save them an ocean away in America. Doing so, Gordon discovers the forgotten fragments of her family's history and a vivid sense of her own Jewish identity"--
Author: Jeffrey Veidlinger
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253011523
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 441
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Book Description
A history based on interviews with hundreds of Ukrainian Jews who survived both Hitler and Stalin, recounting experiences ordinary and extraordinary. The story of how the Holocaust decimated Jewish life in the shtetls of Eastern Europe is well known. Still, thousands of Jews in these small towns survived the war and returned afterward to rebuild their communities. The recollections of some four hundred returnees in Ukraine provide the basis for Jeffrey Veidlinger’s reappraisal of the traditional narrative of twentieth-century Jewish history. These elderly Yiddish speakers relate their memories of Jewish life in the prewar shtetl, their stories of survival during the Holocaust, and their experiences living as Jews under Communism. Despite Stalinist repressions, the Holocaust, and official antisemitism, their individual remembrances of family life, religious observance, education, and work testify to the survival of Jewish life in the shadow of the shtetl to this day.
Author: Willie Sterner
Publisher: Azrieli Series of Holocaust Su
ISBN: 9781897470183
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 208
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Book Description
Willie Sterner's skill as a painter brought him to a fateful meeting with the renowned Oskar Schindler and helped him evade death at the hands of the Nazis.
Author: George Lucius Salton
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 0299179745
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 239
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Book Description
"For the next three years, Luzek slaved and barely survived in ten concentration camps, including Rzeszow, Plaszow, Flossenburg, Colmar, Sachsenhausen, Braunschweig, Ravensbruck, and Wobbelin. Cattle cars filled with skeletal men emptied into a train yard in Colmar, France. Luzek and the other prisoners marched under the whips and fists of SS guards. But here, unlike the taunts and rocks from villagers in Poland and Germany, there was applause. "I could clearly hear the people calling: 'Shame! Shame!' . . . Suddenly, I realized that the people of Golmar were applauding us! They were condemning the inhumanity of the Germans!"".
Author: Dan Bar-On
Publisher: Central European University Press
ISBN: 9789639116337
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 328
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Book Description
Serious difficulties arise when people try to make sense of their feelings, behavior, and discourse in everyday life and, especially, after traumatic experiences. Two groups of impediments are identified: the "indescribable" is demonstrated by a group of pathfinders working through their different maps of mind and nature; by individuals trying to understand and integrate a first heart attack into their previous life experiences. The "undiscussable" is highlighted in the intergenerational transmission of traumatic experiences in the families of Holocaust survivors and Nazi perpetrators. By providing a unique way of looking at life experiences, embedded in a variety of social contexts, this book suggests a new psychosocial theoretical framework which can be used by both laymen and professionals when confronted by troublesome issues that require acknowledgement.
Author: Esther Safran Foer
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 0525576002
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 272
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Book Description
NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARDS FINALIST • “Part personal quest, part testament, and all thoughtfully, compassionately written.”—The Washington Post “Esther Safran Foer is a force of nature: a leader of the Jewish people, the matriarch of America’s leading literary family, an eloquent defender of the proposition that memory matters. And now, a riveting memoirist.”—Jeffrey Goldberg, editor in chief of The Atlantic NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR Esther Safran Foer grew up in a home where the past was too terrible to speak of. The child of parents who were each the sole survivors of their respective families, for Esther the Holocaust loomed in the backdrop of daily life, felt but never discussed. The result was a childhood marked by painful silences and continued tragedy. Even as she built a successful career, married, and raised three children, Esther always felt herself searching. So when Esther’s mother casually mentions an astonishing revelation—that her father had a previous wife and daughter, both killed in the Holocaust—Esther resolves to find out who they were, and how her father survived. Armed with only a black-and-white photo and a hand-drawn map, she travels to Ukraine, determined to find the shtetl where her father hid during the war. What she finds reshapes her identity and gives her the opportunity to finally mourn. I Want You to Know We’re Still Here is the poignant and deeply moving story not only of Esther’s journey but of four generations living in the shadow of the Holocaust. They are four generations of survivors, storytellers, and memory keepers, determined not just to keep the past alive but to imbue the present with life and more life.
