“…Chapman illuminates the struggles of every immigrant child in a fictionalized account of her own mother’s experiences. Sent out of Germany at age 12 in 1938, Edith goes to live with an uncle’s family in the U.S. Her aunt, though happy to have the stipend the family receives for hosting her niece, treats her like a servant, not a relative; she is an outsider at school and must register as an enemy alien. Edith’s only joy rests in following the career of baseball legend Hank Greenberg.

“Until she was 77, Chapman’s mother did not know that she had been part of a rescue operation organized by Lutherans, Quakers and Jews that ultimately saved 1,200 children. In this work of historical fiction, Chapman, the author of an acclaimed memoir, Motherland: Beyond the Holocaust, A Daughter’s Journey to Reclaim the Past, gives a voice to her mother and other Holocaust survivors.”

Memoirist Berthe Meijer

A new memoir by Berthe Meijer, a Holocaust survivor who, at the age of six, was an inmate at Bergen Belsen along with Anne Frank, “continues the tale of Holocaust victims where the famous diary leaves off.”

The book, Life After Anne Frank, tells of Meijer’s acquaintance with Anne Frank. Meijer claims she remembers Frank’s attempts to comfort the small children in the camps by telling stories.

The major focus of the memoir, however, is the long reach of trauma. Despite the fact that Meijer fulfilled many of Anne Frank’s dreams by becoming a journalist and author, she says she has suffered with lifelong symptoms of post-traumatic stress as memories continue to haunt her to this day. For example, she says, sliding a finger along a pan to collect sauce triggers the memory of licking a cooking vat when she was starving in the camps. In addition, she has a deep fear of crowds and public transportation.

“The dividing line is where the diary of Anne Frank ends,” Meijer told The Associated Press at her Amsterdam home. “Because then you fall into a big black hole.”

In history books, she adds,”the war ends when we were liberated. No. Not for a lot of people. Not for the lives of the people who survived those camps or went into hiding or had traumatic experiences because of that war.

“Those things, they don’t go away.”

“Is It Night or Day?”

By Fern Schumer Chapman

Farrar Straus Giroux, $16.99, ages 10-14

In 1942, four years after the novel’s opening, Edith, now 16, sits by Lake Michigan, having just heard about her family’s deaths in Germany. Fern Schumer Chapman tells the story of her mother’s life from a child’s point of view. The story recognizes, for instance, how exciting shipboard events and sightseeing in New York might seem to a child. Yet readers also feel Edith’s anxiety as she boards a train for Chicago, by herself, the ID card around her neck her only companion. She goes to an uncle’s home, whom she’s never met, and where her aunt and cousin are unwelcoming. The family’s Jewish identity is different from what she has known. Only very slowly does another American world emerge for her, starring baseball (the White Sox) and the national coverage of Hank Greenberg. Not a comfortable look back, but a convincing story of Edith’s bravery.

Mary Harris Russell

Anne Frank

“I can shake off everything if I write,” Anne Frank wrote in her diary in April 1944. “My sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn. But, and that is the great question, will I ever be able to write something great, will I ever become a journalist or a writer?”

Ernest Hemingway

“We are all bitched from the start,” wrote Ernest Hemingway in a 1934 letter to F.Scott Fitzgerald, “and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get that damned hurt, use it.”

When Hemingway was asked if he had ever had an analyst, he said, “Sure I have. Portable Corona number three. That’s been my analyst.”

The German edition of "Motherland"

I just received this email from my German friend, Christina Schreck, a resident of my mother’s home town, Stockstadt am Rhein:

“I want to tell you about ‘Motherland-Reading’ in Rüsselsheim yesterday evening. There were the two ladies from the theater in Rüsselsheim who acted out a dialogue from your book, Mutterland. Do you remember, it was similar to the reading in Rüsselsheim in 2006 during your visit?

Rüsselsheim, Germany

“It was great! The house was full. People were so interested in (Edith’s) life and your progress in writing. They wanted to know more about your new book.

“A lot of people asked me about you. They were so interested!”

In an ongoing correspondence, a member of the German Society to Preserve Jewish Culture repeatedly invited a Jewish man, who had fled his hometown of Warfelden when he was 14, to return to Germany for a visit. The Jewish man refused, stating that he would never return because former Nazis still lived in the town: In one letter, he listed the names of those he believed were Nazis.

Eventually, the German convinced the Jewish man to visit and, in anticipation of the event, the German Society to Preserve Jewish Culture displayed the correspondence between the two men at an exhibit at the Warfelden Village Hall. But in the letter that listed the former Nazis in the town, the names were whited out.

"It's like a secret society."

“It’s like a secret society,” explained the German. “The elders don’t want it known who were the Nazis. In village life, if your grandfather is a Nazi, you are labeled.”

While visiting Warfelden, the local church asked the Jewish man to give a speech. “Don’t build monuments,” the man said in his native German. “Educate your children. Remembrance is not in stone, but in the hearts of men.”

After the speech, the church choir sang We Shall Overcome in German.

In 1938, my grandparents, sensing the growing anti-Semitism in Germany, sent my mother to live in America, all by herself. She was twelve years old. She was part of an unknown American rescue operation later named “the One Thousand Children,” which sought to place child refugees in foster families to escape Nazi persecution. The children knew little of what was happening to them, and my mother would not know her whole story until just a few years ago.

Today, seventy-three years after she first came to America, her story is available in bookstores and online.

Order now!

A recent New York Times (Sunday, Feb. 28, 2010) review of Dani Shapiro’s new memoir, Devotion, underscores the general insensitivity and lack of understanding of trauma. Here is the link to the review:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/books/review/Newman-t.html

The book captures Shapiro’s discontent, despite the fact that her life is going well: After two failed marriages, she has a husband she adores; her ill son now is recovered; she has a beautiful home and undiminished beauty.

Dani Shapiro's memoir, "Devotion"

Still, the reviewer Judith Newman writes, “She is a wreck. She wants to know why. So do we.”

Newman quotes Shapiro’s statements that she is as anxious as the days after 9/11, when she picked up her family and fled to rural Connecticut. “Deep within my body, the past is still alive,” Shapiro writes. “Everything that has ever happened keeps happening.” Later, the reviewer quotes Shapiro’s statement: “I was still shivering in the shadow of Jacob’s illness…I had trouble trusting that it was really over.”

Readers of this blog will immediately recognize that these statements ring with tell-tale signs of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), a condition characterized by intense fear, helplessness, or horror. PTSD is rooted in exposure earlier in life to extremely stressful life-threatening experiences. For healthy people, memories are recalled as stories that change over time and do not evoke intense emotions and sensations. But those who suffer with PTSD relive the experience in the present and feel as if the trauma is happening all over again.

“I couldn’t help wishing that two years of spiritual searching would bring her out of her funk,” Newman impatiently writes, “that perhaps I could lead her to the Congregation of Cher, where instead of everyone chanting ‘Amen,’ they’d shout: Snap out of it!”

If only it were that simple.

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Fern Schumer Chapman – Is it Day or Night?

Please welcome author Fern Schumer Chapman. Junior Library Guild has selected her new book, Is It Night or Day? (March 2010), as a spring title. In a starred review, Booklist called the work ”powerful and eloquent,” adding, ”as with the best writing, the specifics about life as a young immigrant are universal.” A prequel to Chapman’s first book Motherland, the new book explores a little-known program which rescued some 1,200 youngsters from the Holocaust. Chapman’s first book received honors including Barnes & Noble Discover Title, BookSense 76 pick. The Illinois Association of Teachers of English named Chapman the “Illinois Author of the Year 2004.”

To read interview, please click here: Fern Schumer Chapman – Is it Day or Night?

Ruth Kluger's memoir, "Still Alive"

Ever since she turned 12 years old in 1938, my mother suffered with a profound sense of rejection because her parents chose to send her to safety in America. Throughout her life, my mother continued to see this act through the lens of a child. She felt her parents didn’t love her enough to keep her in Germany. She didn’t blame Hitler for her situation; she blamed her parents and, until she was in her late sixties, she believed they had betrayed her.

Ironically, a woman named Ruth Kluger harbored similar resentments towards her parents, though they had made a very different choice. In her book, Still Alive, A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered, Kluger recounts that her parents had rejected the opportunity to send her on the Kindertransport to safety. Kluger’s parents believed that “a child and its mother belong together.”

Decades later, Kluger reports in her book that their decision shows that her parents lacked the primal instinct to protect their young. By keeping her in Vienna, Kluger felt her parents had  betrayed her.