Earlier this year, the Forverts asked readers to submit anecdotes and photos of their favorite heirlooms. Heirlooms are not only a way of keeping us connected to our past; they are also a wonderful way to transmit family history to our children and grandchildren The response to our search was an enthusiastic one and 22…
When her new chocolate company needed a name, Sara Meyer and her husband, Corey, decided to connect it to his maternal grandmother — Faigele/Faigy/Fay, meaning little bird in Yiddish — and her love of chocolate. Both are memorialized in the name they came up with: Little Bird. While Fay usually kept several boxes of random…
Among the handful of photographs in the Holocaust memorial book of Zbaraz, my ancestral town in western Ukraine, is a black-and-white picture of sad-eyed men and women standing beside a 10-foot tall monument. It is inscribed with the words “Here lies soap, made by the German mass-murderers, from the bodies of our brethren. May their…
The Family: Three Journeys into the Heart of the Twentieth Century By David Laskin Viking Adult, 400 pages, $32 David Laskin descends from the most privileged branch of an Eastern European Jewish clan that, like many, splintered into three groups during the convulsions of the last century. Geography turned out to be destiny: The Americans…
The World of the End By Ofir Touché Gafla Translated by Mitch Ginsburg Tor Books, 368 pages, $16.98 A recent cartoon published in the New Yorker shows a group of people standing by a grave. A woman is speaking, and the caption reads, “Wherever he is, I know he’ll be upgraded.” Might the afterworld —…
On my first trip to Israel, just hours after I landed in Tel Aviv, my Israeli cousin Benny told me that he had nearly 300 family letters dating back to the 1930s and ’40s. I had come to Israel to research a book about the family that Benny and I have in common, and this…
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