We’ve reached a pivotal cultural moment in Holocaust historiography and memoir, poised between the final thoughts of the last survivors and the attempts of their children — and, more recently, their grandchildren — to make sense of their legacy. It’s a phenomenon with an equivalent in Germany, where the so-called Third Generation has been reckoning…
Paper Love: Searching for the Girl My Grandfather Left Behind By Sarah Wildman Riverhead Books, 400 pages, $27.95 A Fifty-Year Silence: Love, War, and a Ruined House in France By Miranda Richmond Mouillot Crown, 288 pages, $26 The latest Holocaust memoirs are by people who weren’t there, who are linked to the tragedy by the…
In my parents’ basement I found a box of my grandfather’s, marked “C.J. Wildman, personal”; inside it I discovered another, smaller file box labeled “Patient Correspondence, A–G.” The letters were not from patients; they were from the life he left behind in Vienna when he fled the Nazis: half-siblings, cousins, friends — and a girlfriend….
A group drives up to the Mount of Olives and takes in the vista below: the Old City of Jerusalem; the Dome of the Rock in the near distance; the modern city a bit farther off. An Israeli tour guide begins to explain the importance of this spot to the Jewish people. “King David,” he…
We were raised to be vigilant. We were taught to fight oppression, admonished to be New Jews — strong, muscular, defiant. We were told to look for the signs, the slogans and the double-speak. We learned at the knee of those with tattooed forearms; knelt at the feet of those who lost brothers and sisters,…
I am terrified of having a second child. There, I said it. Terrified. I’m totally breathless. I’m in a tailspin, a panic, a freak-out. Let me contextualize: I woke in the night, several times in recent weeks, panicking that I might be pregnant. My thoughts racing, I found myself staring at the ceiling — 2,…
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