Those Stories, historical ramblings, and more!
Monday marks the beginning of Pesach – always my favorite Jewish holiday, rich in both tradition and meaning. While an important piece of the Passover story is the Jews’ escape from 430 years of slavery, the celebration is not just about freedom but immigration - much like my family’s escape from the Nazis.
Read MoreOn February 20, 1939, New York City’s Madison Square Garden wasn’t filled with hockey fans or boxing enthusiasts but with members of the German-American Bund – more than 20 thousand of them who gathered to support the Nazi cause. Safely in neutral Belgium, my Jewish father celebrated his 36th birthday while Nazi sympathizers railed against the Jews more than 3600 miles away. To this day, I wonder if he would have been shocked by such sentiments infiltrating the land across the Atlantic – the place he hoped would one day offer refuge.
Read MoreIn The Wake of Madness: My Family’s Escape from the Nazis is now on sale everywhere! Ebooks on Amazon.com. Paperbacks can be ordered at your favorite brick and mortar or online bookseller. Special thanks to my advance readers!
Read MoreWhen I was growing up, I thought of my parents as the lucky ones. So many had perished during the Holocaust that I did not associate that term with them. After all, they had never been carted off to a labor camp or death camp. They were hunted, but they were not caught. Did that count? Clearly, the upending of their lives was traumatic but not equivalent to the tragedy of whole families and whole communities – be they Jews, Romi and Sinti, Jehovah’s Witnesses, LGBTQ, disabled, political enemies like German Communists, Socialists, and Social Democrats, or members of the Resistance – exterminated systematically. That’s a long list of “others,” isn’t it? When one group is persecuted in a Fascist regime, they are usually not alone for long.
Read MoreThoughts for the New Year
Read MoreYou can now pre-order a digital copy of In the Wake of Madness: My Family’s escape from the Nazis. Paperbacks coming soon! Goodreads Giveaway of 100 Kindle copies open on Dec. 30
Read MoreIt is a simple matter for scientists, explained by the geology of millennia,
layers of sediment stacked like pancakes, laced with
one mineral or another, a bit of iron oxide here, and there, a bit more.
Sandstone, limestone, shale hiding snail fossils and trilobites,
clues in the long game of time, prizes scattered in
Utah’s Crackerjacks box of ancient sand left behind by
a vast inland sea, dehydrated into desert, then rearranged
as plates shifted – contracting, expanding, crashing, twirling,
slipping like dancers coming together and pulling apart,
closing the show with one exquisite, cockeyed lift.
Read MoreHenk Pander’s haunting childhood memories of the Nazis on Dutch soil were the source of a compelling series of paintings that draw you in with their artistry and, then, the recognition of their fiery history. They were painted toward the end of Pander’s life, intended as much to highlight present-day concerns as document the past.
Read MoreTwo stories - one of hope and one of hate - sit side by side in my inbox.
Read MoreBecause my parents survived the Holocaust, I have thought endlessly – and not very productively – about how so many otherwise decent people did nothing. But the other side of the coin is this: If I were witness to such terror, could I find the courage in myself to act?
There are so many who did find the courage to help in whatever way they could. Non-Jews who put themselves in harm’s way have been dubbed The Righteous Among the Nations. I came across some of their stories while researching my family’s escape from the Nazis for my upcoming book, In the Wake of Madness.
Read MoreI have a good friend who loves the familiar. If she finds a good breakfast spot, she wants to go there again and again. In the spirit of the TV show Cheers, she enjoys a place where everybody knows her name. I, on the other hand, can hardly stand walking the same two square miles week after week. I crave change and newness, but I am my best self when I can find that delicate balance between that which is comfortingly ordinary and that which is disconcertingly different.
Read MoreBy 1971, my heroes, US Representatives Bella Abzug and Shirley Chisholm, embodied all I thought would come to pass. “The test of whether or not you can hold a job should not be in the arrangement of your chromosomes,” said Bella. It was so profound and yet so obvious that it astonished me that it needed to be said aloud. “If they don’t give you a seat at the table,” Shirley Chisholm advised, “bring in a folding chair.” I was planning to have a closet full of folding chairs.
Read MoreRobert, the name my father adopted when he came to America, never lost his European formality. Typical dress was a pressed white shirt with cufflinks, a somber suit, Florsheim wingtips, and a homburg hat. His hair was slicked down with Eau de Pinaud, a Portuguese hair tonic, and an unlit cigarette dangled from his mouth. His outfit reflected his demeanor: he was a serious man – which is why it was so wonderful to see him relax or laugh. Seeing photos of his younger days, you can already see his sense of purpose. My mother was a light spirit by comparison, and that optimism may have buoyed him more than he realized. When she persuaded him to wear casual shirts or branch out into pale blue, it was a banner day.
Read MoreMy parents fled the Nazis, arriving in New York in 1941. Born just four years after Germany’s surrender, I was keenly aware of the Holocaust, though my parents rarely shared details, wanting to face forward rather than look back. But, at school, I was puzzled that the Holocaust was barely mentioned in World War 2 history texts. As Germany was developing into an ally against Communism, it seemed that some wanted to downplay the regrettable “mistakes” of the past. Even to me, the systematic murder of six million Jews and other “undesirables” was impossible to comprehend, and seemed a little like ancient history.
Fast forward to the present day, and we see a disheartening trend, particularly among Millenials (now in their forties) and Generation Z (those born 1997-2012). In many ways, these generations are among the best-educated and most socially conscious, yet there is a disturbing lack of knowledge when it comes to the Holocaust.
Read MoreThe beautiful new sculpture “The Embrace” by artist Hank Willis Thomas honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and his wife Coretta Scott King, got me thinking about the way things have and haven’t changed, and the overarching need to hold on to one another.
Read MoreHas the #Me Too movement left victims of domestic violence behind? Will the NRA manage to overturn an important new provision slated to be added to the Violence Against Women Act up for a vote this week? Are we all damaged in one way or another, and how do we move forward? Musings based on current events as they relate to the novel, Angel Unfolding, along with the author’s favorite Grey’s Anatomy lines.
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