Motherland

...and when does adulthood begin? • Nineteen-year-olds can drive tanks in Afghanistan, but they aren’t considered responsible enough to drive a rental car. • Courts treat 13-year-olds as adults, yet they cannot rent adult DVDs. • Executing convicts for offenses committed before age 18 is unconstitutional. • In Judaism, a boy becomes a man (the bar mitzvah) at 13. “For drinking, driving, fighting in the military, compulsory schooling, watching an ...

Last Friday, I gave seven back-to-back presentations to students at Marian Central Catholic High School in Woodstock, Illinois. Whenever I spend a day teaching, I rediscover that the occupation is grueling and exhausting, but deeply satisfying. Next time I walk a mile, or I should say, run a marathon as a teacher, I’ll remember that those are big shoes to fill…and they are high heels.

When I was writing Motherland, I relied on notes for all the chapters except one. For that chapter, I had taped an interview with a key source and, when I sat down to write it, I listened carefully to the tape and captured what I heard. "What happened to you?" my agent asked upon reading that chapter. "This doesn't work at all? What happened to your voice?" I explained that ...

Once, when I was eight years old, my mother raised a subject she had never discussed before – her hometown. “I’m from Stockstadt am Rhein.” “Where?” The town’s name was foreign, but the way she said it, with a thick German accent, revealed a part of her I never knew existed. She went to the shelf, dragged the oversized, heavy Rand McNally Atlas of the World to the kitchen table ...

For authors, publishing a book is a little like dropping a fishing line into a pond. We never know who will take our bait. When I wrote Motherland, I imagined telling the story to a good friend whom I have known for decades. I wished she could have come with me on my trips to Germany. Instead, I tried to give her the experience through the book. I couldn’t have ...

In 1938, when my mother fled Stockstadt am Rhein -- the small German town her family had helped settle in 1721 -- it had 2,000 people and two Jewish families totaling eight people. That means the Jewish population in Stockstadt was about one half of one percent, a statistic that mirrored Germany at large. In 1939, 350,000 Jews lived in a country of 50,000,000 people. By 1945, the German Jewish ...

Dr. Robert Sapolsky and friend I stumbled upon Professor Robert Sapolsky’s lecture series at a local library. His presentations gave me an amazing understanding of stress. Dr. Sapolsky, a MacArthur Fellow and a professor at Stanford University, spends each summer in Kenya studying a population of wild baboons, trying to identify the relationship between an animal’s personality, environment and stress levels. What Dr. Sapolsky has discovered is that low-ranking baboons ...

I’m often asked why I titled my upcoming book, Is It Night or Day? Warning: what follows is a bit of a spoiler. An explanation of the title appears on page 205 of the book. For those who don’t want to wait, read on. The cover of my new book, "Is It Night or Day?" My new book is about child immigration. Throughout history, many families have made the painful ...

Each day, ideas fly through my mind like birds gliding across the vast blue sky. They flicker in my consciousness, capturing my attention for only a moment. “Hmmmm,” I say to myself, or “Interesting.” Then they pass. I haven't ever taken the time to record or catalog my birds. But now, I have entered the world of blogging. Here, in this unique medium, small, significant thoughts or fleeting observations are ...

While listening to the radio yesterday, I heard an interview with a man who was telling the story of how his father had been murdered. I was struck by the way in which the man remembered the incident, which happened when he was 9 years old: “It was dark. They were kids. He was killed.” Then, he would take a breath, collect himself, try again. “It was a gang. He ...