Motherland

Viking/Penguin buys FSC’s next project!

From Publisher's Marketplace: March 6, 2018 Non-fiction: Advice/Relationships Fern Schumer Chapman's RETURNING BY THE ROAD WE CAME: On Sibling Relationships, Lost and Found Again, an exploration of estrangement and reconciliation between sisters and brothers, and how these relationships can be transformed, to Carole Desanti at Viking, by Marian Young (world).   If you are estranged from a sibling and you would like to take a survey and participate in my ...

News from Jane Addams Junior High School

 Jane Addams JHS eighth-graders were riveted during an assembly this morning as they listened to award-winning author Fern Schumer Chapman share the story of her mother, 92-year-old Holocaust refugee Edith Westerfeld – and then heard from Westerfeld herself. The presentation tied in with the students’ studies of the Holocaust in Language Arts and World War II in social studies. Westerfeld was 12 when her parents sent her to the United ...

Junior Library Guild selects THREE STARS IN THE NIGHT SKY for fall list 2018

At the age of 12, Gerda Katz fled Nazi Germany and came to America all by herself. Decades before the label gained recognition, she became what’s now known as an “unaccompanied minor.” Gerda’s story of family separation reflects the dislocating trauma, culture shock, and excruciating loneliness many unaccompanied minor immigrants experience. As Gerda becomes an American, she never stops longing to be reunited with her family. Three Stars in the ...

Jewish Book Council reviews STUMBLING ON HISTORY

Stumbling on History: An Art Project Compels a Small German Town to Face Its Past Fern Schumer Chapman Gussie Rose Press  2016 54 Pages    $17.99 ISBN: 978-0996472517   Review by Teri Markson This slender book is both a memory and a memorial, a tribute and a warning, a look at what is and what was. Author Fern Schumer Chapman first recounts the experience of her German born mother, 89-year-old Edith ...

In Memoriam – Gerda Katz Frumkin

In Memoriam Gerda Katz Frumkin Dec. 4, 1925 - Sept. 22, 2017 We are mourning the loss of Gerda Katz Frumkin, my mother's childhood friend. After becoming best friends on the ship from Nazi Germany to America, Edith (my mother) and Gerda lost touch with each other in 1938. In 2011, eighth graders reunited the two old friends, 73 years after they last saw each other. Like Finding My Twin ...

Association of Jewish Libraries reviews STUMBLING

In The Spotlight Chapman, Fern Schumer. Stumbling on History: An Art Project Compels a Small German Town to Face its Past. Lake Bluff, IL: Gussie Rose Press, 2016. (Now available from Kar-Ben Publishers) 56 pp. $17.99. (9780996472517). PBK. Gr. 6-12. Reviewed from ARC. The central story of this illustrated non-fiction book is about unique public art project honoring individual Holocaust victims. It explains one way modern Germans are recognizing and ...