The hardcover for Motherland was released in March of 2000. Happily, the book is still in print and readers and bloggers continue to review it online. Here is a recent review from Esmerelda’s blog at http://esmereldasbookthing.blogspot.com/

Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Motherland by Fern Schumer Chapman

At its heart, this book by a Holocaust survivor’s daughter, is a love letter from daughter to mother. In 1990 Fern and her mother Edith, make a trip back to Edith’s hometown in Germany. The time has come for Edith to visit the past from which she was cut off 50 years before when her Jewish parents sent her to live with relatives in Chicago. The horrors being heaped upon Jewish citizens were growing every day.

The bulk of this memoir is the story of this trip and the memories that Edith relives by setting foot in her village. This book is a powerful testament to memory and how we care for and shape our memories as we age. Edith visits her family home and picks up dirt off the basement floor as she is overcome with thoughts of her past. She visits an odd museum where she swears she sees some of her family’s possessions including her school satchel. These scenes filled me with sadness for Edith, long parted from her family.

Daughter Fern spent her life never really knowing her mother Edith. Edith could never share with Fern her sorrows and her regrets. Fern never knew any of her mother’s childhood or memories of life in Germany.

So there they were togther, building bonds about the past. Edith and Fern learned about all that had happened to Edith’s parents after she was shipped from Germany to the USA. Everything they see and do in Germany feels meaningful and filled with great sorrow. Toward the end of their trip they hear a confession of a man who treated her family poorly. They meet an old family friend who was filled with vitriol and unhappiness of the time during the war. Where Edith had shut off the past totally, Mina had lived in the past constantly. The contrast between the two old friends couldn’t have been more stark.

I loved this story. Every situation pulsed with meaning and reader’s will have a richer understanding of the role that memories can play in all our lives. It felt like Fern and Edith were solving a real life mystery that involved cemeteries and old photographs and haunting times. Without spoiling too much, as a reader will want to let this interesting trip unfold to them without knowing much in advance, there is a conversation between Fern and her mother on the last night of the trip which changes the way Fern sees her mother after all these years. It involves Edith’s description of being placed on the boat to America and saying good-bye to her parents forvever. It broke my heart.

The writing was excellent and the story sweet and sad. I highly recommend it.

Posted by Esmerelda at 2:45 AM 0 comments

by Barbara Bietz – Children’s Book Reviews

Several new novels written for older kids and teens have fascinating characters and compelling plots, involving significant events in history and contemporary issues facing society today.

From the civil rights movement to immigrant children during WWII, to the effects of war on soldiers and their families, these novels will help teen readers think about their world in new ways.

Is it Night or Day? by Fern Schumer Chapman

When the Nazi’s evil makes its way to her family’s little town in Germany, Edith’s family must make quick decisions. Her parents will not leave her grandmother behind, and her older sister Betty has already settled in Chicago. Edith is stoic when her parents put her on a ship to America. Her sense of loss is palpable and any young reader will find her situation sympathetic. What if my parents didn’t come to America? What if they never got their passports and papers? What if I never saw them again? After meeting other children her age on the ship, Edith begins to hope for a good life in America. When she finally arrives in Chicago to live with her Uncle Jack and Aunt Mildred, Edith’s dream for a new life shatters. Aunt Mildred treats her like a servant, her cousin Dorothy scoffs at her, and her Uncle Jack seems too weak to stand up for her. Even worse, she barely sees her sister Betty who lives with another family an hour away, and brags on about her “new” sister. At school Edith is teased for being a foreigner. Edith finds solace in the library and finds determination and inner strength through her tribulations. Edith’s tragic story touches on the universal experience of many children who were sent to America during WWII. Their stories are not well-known. Is it Night or Day? is based on the true story of the author’s mother and sheds light on the devastating experiences of children who may have survived the war, but whose lives we were forever changed when they were forced to separate from their families.

My Life with the Lincolns by Gayle Brandeis

Things A Brother Knows by Dana Reinhardt

AZ Lost Boys Center Phoeniz AZ

An article in Sunday’s New York Times reported that s a new digital archive is now available for the “Lost Boys of Sudan.” The archive offers some of the Sudanese refugees who fled their country as children records of their personal war stories.

The newspaper reported (in italics below) that Malek Deng, a refugee who fled at the age of 14, examined some of the papers from his war-torn childhood that he had never seen before. “The papers said he was born in a village called Thur Kuol in the Bahr al-Gazal region of southwestern Sudan. The documents listed Mr. Deng’s relatives and recounted how he tended cattle before civil war drove him from his family. He has explained to the interviewers that he fled with other Lost Boys to avoid being kidnapped by soldiers from northern Sudan.

“It’s amazing to see,” said an emotional Mr. Deng, now a medical technician in his mid-30s who lives in Phoenix. “It’s proof of my past. In my head, I know what I went through. I can tell people verbally, but now I have some records to prove it.”

Often, refugees (like my mother) lose so much of themselves in their immigration — home, country, family, language, identity. One of the greatest losses is people — family and friends — to cross-reference experiences, witnesses to childhood to share or contradict recollections, provide testimony and a frame of reference.

In the absence of those people, records and pictures fill in some of the blanks. “This photo is all I have of my childhood,” Kuol Awan, executive director of the AZ Lost Boys Center and a refugee himself, said as he gazed at a snapshot taken when he was about 15. “I can show this to my grandchildren one day when I tell them stories about my life.”

One Thousand Children

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Rescue effort

While a generation of 1.5 million children perished in the Holocaust, over one thousand children were brought to America in quiet operations designed to avoid attention from isolationist and anti-Semitic forces. These children:

• came from Europe to the United States mainly from 1934 through 1945;
• were aged from fourteen months old through the age of sixteen;
• arrived unaccompanied, leaving their parents behind, and
• were then placed with foster families, schools and facilities across the U.S.

To view the complete Wikipedia link, please click here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Thousand_Children

From Gert Krell, my German blog partner at shadowsoftheholocaust.com:

Chagall's rabbi

Last night, as we do every year, we joined a group of people from Hofheim at the “Türmchen“, the little former watch tower in the old town wall which had been a synagogue until the “Reichspogromnacht” (the night of the pogroms) in November 9/10, 1938. A group of pupils from the local grammar school sang a song in Hebrew, and Mr. Schelwies from the Association for Christian-Jewish Cooperation gave an introductory speech. Mr. Krull, another Protestant vicar, then talked about Marc Chagall’s painting “The Rabbi with the Thora-Roll” from 1941. The rabbi’s face is Chagall’s and his name is inscribed on the thora in small Hebrew letters below the shields of David.

After another song, we all lit candles and put them down at the wall of the “Türmchen” in memory of the Jews from Hofheim who were expelled or murdered. Among them were Adolf and Hermine Oppenheimer. When a policeman had called upon them in August 1942 for their deportation, their Christian neighbours had come down to join them in the street to say good-bye. Adolf and Hermine Oppenheimer begged them: “Don’t forget us.”

When I woke up the next morning, I thought about the non-medical practitioner I will see next week. I fantasized she would ask me what I would cry about if I wanted to. I would cry about the Holocaust and about World War II, which I so narrowly escaped. (I’m currently reading the new book about the German Foreign Ministry during the Nazi era. Meanwhile, the papers say that the Finance Ministry had also been much more involved in the persecution and murder of the Jews than had been public knowledge.)

I would cry with my head and my heart, but I would cry with all my body about the loss of our first child in 1977, who would be 35 on November 13. It makes a difference whether you read or hear about the early death or the murder of somebody else or whether you lose someone very close to yourself. But I do have a sense of how other people feel about their losses. Rabbi Manfred Aron from Hofheim-Wallau, which was a separate village until 1977 with its own synagogue, lost his wife and most of his nine children in the Holocaust. He had escaped to Holland in 1939 and wanted to get his family out, too. It was too late for that, and he only survived because a Dutch family hid him in their house.

Mr. Schelwies told us about Rabbi Leo Trepp from Mainz, who emigrated to the United States after the Nazis had taken him to Sachsenhausen, but who always came back to his former Heimat after the war to teach Jewish studies until he was over 90 and in a wheelchair. (He died in September this year, one day before the consecration of the new synagogue in Mainz, at the age of 97.) In one of his lectures, Rabbi Trepp had said, he believed that God had taken the lives of his more than 20 relations in the Holocaust, and that he would commit suicide, if he imagined that a scoundrel had murdered them. To me, this sounds a little strange, because – as I have told you already – I don’t think that God is omnipotent. But I agree that there is a different order beyond life on earth, and also beyond hatred, murder, and death.

It is very sad that so often people die before their time, particularly if their lives are taken away by other human beings. But at least they are safe now and rest in peace. They have literally become part of the universe again, miniscule as that part may be; of an incredibly and unfathomably fascinating universe. Is there love in this universe? Probably not by itself. But there is, if we remember the dead and honour them.

To read Gert’s current blogs about German Industry and Forced Labor, please visit www.shadowsoftheholocaust.com.

Kristallnacht, November 9-10, 1938

One of my dedicated blog readers complained today that I didn’t properly mark the anniversary of Kristallnacht.

“You haven’t been keeping up your blog lately,” she said.

“Yes, I know,” I said. “I’ve been in and out of town for the last month.”

“Well, I thought you’d write something about Kristallnacht yesterday. Do you think the kids today have ever heard of it? Do you think they know much about World War II? Who’s going to tell them?”

She has a point. Even those of us educated in the 1960s and 1970s didn’t get much history of the last half of the 20th century. Seems like the school year ended around the time we got up to The League of Nations. So, as far as we knew, nothing happened after the end of World War I. Consequently, many of us — including me — didn’t learn about the Holocaust in high school.

A woman raised in Louisiana in the 1960s said she received an even narrower education in history. She wrote me after reading Motherland and said, “Thank you for telling your mother’s story. I was raised in the South and the only thing we studied in history class was the Civil War.”

My German friends tell me that they received no education in the Holocaust since Germany was unwilling to face its own history at that time. Finally, in 1965 schools began to require students to read The Diary of Anne Frank. When the mini-series, Holocaust, was broadcast in 1978, German schools began to expose students to more material from that time period. In recent years, when I have spoken in German public schools, students have said they are weary of the topic. They claim that every year they have units on the Holocaust and they don’t understand why they need to learn the same thing every year.

But I digress…

Here is the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s description of Kristallnacht:

“On November 9–10, 1938, the Nazis staged vicious pogroms—state sanctioned, anti-Jewish riots—against the Jewish community of Germany. These came to be known as Kristallnacht (now commonly translated as “Night of Broken Glass”), a reference to the untold numbers of broken windows of synagogues, Jewish-owned stores, community centers, and homes plundered and destroyed during the pogroms. Encouraged by the Nazi regime, the rioters burned or destroyed 267 synagogues, vandalized or looted 7,500 Jewish businesses, and killed at least 91 Jewish people. They also damaged many Jewish cemeteries, hospitals, schools, and homes as police and fire brigades stood aside. Kristallnacht was a turning point in history. The pogroms marked an intensification of Nazi anti-Jewish policy that would culminate in the Holocaust—the systematic, state-sponsored murder of Jews.”

Though the event is remembered on November 9th, the riots continued through Nov. 10th.