On Writing

Author Tim O'Brien "War is not strictly the province of those fighting it," Tim O'Brien, the author of The Things They Carried once said. "The lives of all of us are changed forever. The aftershocks go on and on and on." For that matter, any significant event can have the same effect; the aftershocks rattle and shatter families. Once, when I was explaining to a friend that one of the ...

My cousin sent me these pictures which tell the story of a relative's successful German business and its demise. For more than 100 years, the Kahn family owned a shop selling sundries at the corner of Darmstädter Straße/Ecke Sandböhlin in Groß-Gerau. The first picture was taken in 1851. See blog below (Part II) for more recent pictures. c. 1920s - Business owners Frieda and Julius Kahn in car c. 1930s ...

c. 1940s - Kahns flee Germany. Rubble of Kahn's corner store and home present - "Patrick's Corner" New owners rebuilt corner store.

"...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 ...

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. ...

"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 ...

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, ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...