At a speech, I told students at Kennedy Middle School in Naperville, Illinois that when I was growing up, it seemed to me that my mother had divorced herself from her past. As far as I knew, she had no mother, no father, no cousins, no childhood friends, no stories, no family legends, no religious traditions. She never spoke of her early life and I knew I was never to ask. Her past was like a busy intersection that I was to avoid at all cost.

An 8th grade student came up to me after the speech and said that he completely related to the hole in my life. “When you asked us to imagine not being able to ask your parents a single question about their past,” he said, “that really made me think. There are certain things I can’t ask my father. He only has one arm, and he won’t talk about it. That bothers me because I wonder how it happened. I am aching to know, but I can’t ask about my dad’s past.

“Somehow, it feels like it’s not just about him; it’s about me, too.” He’s right. His dad’s past informs him; the missing pieces become part of his identity.

More than 100,000 books come out each year. That means the competition for new authors is crushing. Most books die within three months of release, tossed onto the remainder table, ending their brief shelf life as tax write-offs for the publishing house.

Several trends make the odds even longer for new authors. First, publishing houses play it safe by devoting their marketing dollars to authors like Sarah Palin, who are so well known, they really don’t need the publicity. Meanwhile, the unknown author is left to his or her own marketing devices.

Second, getting reviewed poses a huge challenge for the unknown writer. Newspaper book sections are shrinking and many have disappeared altogether. Those that remain review only a few books each week, maybe 350 each year. Taking a cue from publishers, reviewers tend to focus on titles that will be “big books” by famous authors.

This callous and dysfunctional system is painful for authors who put years into books that go unread. Only a handful of those 100,000 continue to sell even a few months after the release date, let alone the years that Motherland (which was released in 2000) has stayed alive.

What distinguishes a book that keeps selling, even without promotion, without ads or reviews or the Oprah miracle?

Readers. They discover new titles, introduce them to book clubs, tell everyone they know about their latest find. In turn, college and citywide book clubs that encourage thousands of readers to pick up the same book simultaneously are extremely powerful for sales. That kind of buzz has lifted titles like Mitch Albom’s Tuesday With Morrie onto the bestseller list four years after its release.

Schools are another source of ongoing sales. American schools are highly individualistic in their selections of books; teachers typically decide which book is suitable for their classes. But increasingly, teachers are looking for books that use a personal story to illuminate a chapter in history.

So it is possible for a “small” book to succeed, but typically, they go unnoticed for years as schools and book clubs quietly administer life support.

One Sunday over brunch several months ago, the family was having a political discussion about racial profiling.

In her inimitable way, my mother turned to me and said, “You know, I was an enemy alien.”

“What? When?”

In recent years, my mother, who is now in her eighties, has begun to talk about her past, but I was completely shocked by this new revelation.

“When I was 14-years old.”

I looked at her skeptically.

“Really,” she said.

After everyone left, I researched the topic. Of course I knew about the Japanese, but Germans and Italians? And 14-year-old girls?

Turns out, immediately after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the government, seeking to protect the country from spies and saboteurs, fingerprinted and forced people of German, Italian and Japanese decent — even children over 14 years old — to carry identification cards and restricted their travel, seized personal property and interned some of them. Award-winning author Stephen Fox, who has written a book called Fear Itself: Inside the FBI Roundup of German Americans during World War II, reports that 3,000 Italian nationals and 11,000 German nationals — including a few Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany — were detained in the U.S. More than 120,000 Japanese and Japanese-Americans were imprisoned during World War II.

For immigrants like my mother who had lived in Nazi Germany, the designation was terrifying. “The Germans (in America) were issued that card as an enemy alien because they were German,” said one Jewish refugee, who had arrived in America in 1934 when he was a child. “We Jews, on the other hand, were stateless according to the German law under Hitler.”

“I’ve just read some of your blog entries,” writes my high school friend, Carolyn Projansky. “Very powerful. I related to the story you told of the Holocaust survivor who over-mothered her children because she didn’t get enough mothering. (See blog below, “The Forgotten Adults.”) My mother did that, and you’ll recall she was a Holocaust survivor, too. I figured out exactly that reason years ago, in therapy.”

For children of survivors, it can take decades to understand their parent’s behavior. Here are some ways survivors’ losses define their parenting:

Image by Emily Nelson

• Research shows survivors look to their children to replace what was traumatically lost. Consequently, they become over-involved in their children’s lives.
• Survivors can be over-protective of their children, transmitting a sense of distrust of anyone outside the family.
• Some survivors don’t talk and some don’t stop talking. Either tactic can be traumatizing to children.
• Separation or individuation is associated with death for survivors. A child who separates may be seen as betraying or abandoning the family.
• To cope with their losses, many survivors numbed themselves to emotional pain. As parents, they have difficulty showing love.

In time, children see how their parent’s experiences shaped both generations. As Carolyn wrote in her message to me, “I just wish my mother had lived long enough for me to have told her that I understand.”

There are scientific reasons why many immigrants can’t get the sz out of “throw” or the z out of “the.”

Most likely, those who speak with an accent emigrated after the age of 8. Since the critical period for language development begins in infancy and ends between eight years and puberty, it’s difficult to speak a second language without an accent after that time.

“Second languages learned after the critical period are not processed in the same part of the brain as is the native tongue,” writes Dr. Norman Doidge in The Brain That Changes Itself.

Language development may even begin in the womb. By comparing the cries of French and German newborns, researchers have found that French newborns cried with a rising “accent” while German babies’ cries had a falling inflection. The researchers concluded that by mimicking their mothers’ intonations, the babies are attempting to bond with their mothers.

Since the brain is plastic, non-native speakers can learn to speak a second language without an accent, but it requires intense training. Dr. Michael Merzenich, professor emeritus at the University of California at San Francisco and a leading pioneer in brain plasticity research, has helped Japanese people learn to speak accent-less English by grossly exaggerating the r and l sounds so that they could pick up the difference.

But do we really want to do that? Clearly, accents reveal our origins, who we are, and where we are going. They tell our life stories.

The last picture taken of my mother with her parents before she was sent to America in 1938.

When my mother came to this country at the age of 12 all by herself, she had no idea what program organized her journey. She was part of an American rescue operation recently 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 it would be more than 65 years before my mother would learn who to thank.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin

Thirty-six-year-old Google co-founder Sergey Brin came to this country with his family 30 years ago, and he knows exactly how he got here and who to thank. The billionaire, who co-founded the company with a Stanford classmate while they were college students, is giving $1 million to the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS). That organization helped his family escape anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union and settle into this country.

During the 1930s, HIAS aided the “One Thousand Children” who escaped the Holocaust by coming to America.

“One of the most important things that Sergey’s gift signifies, not just for HIAS but more importantly for the nation,” Gideon Aronoff, chief executive of HIAS, told the New York Times, “is the possibilities inherent in being a refugee.”

HIAS, those who write or read blogs like this one, thank you. (It is powered by Google.)

The refugees and their families thank you.

America thanks you.

On a trip to Worfelden, Germany, where my great-grandparents once lived, local residents welcomed my mother and me with a specially compiled pamphlet for our visit that told of the town’s Jewish history. In addition to the copies of the original blueprints for the synagogue and brief biographies of the Jews who once lived in the town, the pamphlet listed Yiddish words commonly used in Germany today.

Under the heading, “Mundartausdrücke aus hebräischem oder jiddischem wortstamm,” which means “dialect expressions derived from Hebrew or Yiddish word,” are these examples:

• Mischpoche – riffraff; clan
• Chuzpe – chutzpah, brazenness
• koscher -kosher
• Malocher – drudge
• Macke – kink, loose screw
• miese – wretched, miserable
• Schmusekurs – schmoozing up
• betucht – well off

Turns out, about 1,100 words of Yiddish origin are listed in linguist Hans Peter Althaus’ Lexikon deutscher Wörter jiddischer Herkunft (Encyclopedia of German Words of Yiddish Provenance).Yiddish became known in German in the 19th and 20th century as German writers sometimes used the words with anti-Semitic intentions to characterize Jewish figures. During the Nazi period, Yiddish words were prohibited or exploited for purposes of anti-Semitic propaganda. Consequently, the post-war German generation never learned Yiddish words. But since the 1980’s, a handful of Yiddish words have become part of everyday German language.

After I give a speech, many people come up and tell me their experiences of immigration, loss, or the legacy of the Holocaust. One woman told me her poignant story many years ago and it has stayed with me.

Here’s what she said:

“I escaped Vienna as a child in 1939. The Nazis killed my parents so I never had a mother or father to love me after the age of 10.

“When I grew up, got married and had two sons, I turned to my children to get the love I should have received from my parents. It was too much for them. My sons couldn’t take it; they distanced themselves from me. So, in different ways, I lost my parents and my children.

“I am an island.”

World news spotlighted another heartbreaking story of child immigration this week. Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd apologized to thousands of British who were shipped to Australia as children. They were promised a better life; instead, they had a Dickensian existence.

More than 500,000 children were placed in foster homes, orphanages and other institutions during the 20th century, according to a 2004 Australian Senate report. Many experienced emotional, physical and sexual abuse.

“We are sorry,” Rudd said. “Sorry that as children you were taken from your families and placed in institutions where so often you were abused. Sorry for the physical suffering, the emotional starvation and the cold absence of love, of tenderness, of care. Sorry for the tragedy — the absolute tragedy — of childhoods lost.”

Children fleeing Nazi Germany for America during the 1930s (like my mother who was sent to live with relatives in Chicago) generally fared better. Most of the American families who took in children were “decent,” according to the book, Don’t Wave Goodbye: The Children’s Flight From Nazi Persecution to American Freedom by Philip K. Jason and Iris Posner. But, Posner writes, “some (families) wanted children to act as companions to their own children, and there were a few who wanted the children to act as servants and maids.” Child welfare organizations tried to weed out families with dubious motives, but they weren’t always successful.

Some of the “One Thousand Children” experienced the same “cold absence of love” as the Forgotten Children. One man said that after he left Germany, no one ever hugged him again throughout his childhood.

Some lost their ability to trust. “What I think happened to me early on was that a subconscious wall went up,” wrote rock ‘n roll producer Bill Graham, who was one of the One Thousand Children. “‘I’m out here on my own. I don’t have anybody.’ An island that I’ve lived on all my life. I knew I had to fend for myself and be careful not to let anything too close for fear of losing it again…Early on, this coat was formed…I’ve always been prepared for loss. And therefore was never left totally naked.”

In a way, they were all forgotten children who lost their childhoods.