On Writing

The Jewish Babe Ruth, "Hammerin' Hank" Baseball star Hank Greenberg is a small but significant character in my new book, "Is It Night or Day?" The book, based upon my mother's experiences, captures Edith's immigration in 1938 and her assimilation into American culture. Frightened, isolated, and ridiculed in her new environment, Edith finds solace in baseball. At that time, Comiskey Park offered free admission for women on Thursdays (Ladies' Day), ...

Searching for a metaphoric home Pulitzer-prize winning novelist Carol Shields once said that “a great novel should follow the character’s search for a metaphoric home.” I’ve thought a lot about that comment recently; it resonates with Is It Night or Day? in two ways. First, that is the trajectory of Edith’s story. She is a child immigrant searching for a home, physically and metaphorically. Young Edith's bewildered efforts to assimilate ...

It's a book!!! In bookstores March 16th.

Is It Night or Day? Fern Schumer Chapman. Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, $16.99 (192p) ISBN 978-0-374-17744-7 Chapman, who wrote about her family's Holocaust ordeal in the adult book Motherland: Beyond the Holocaust, assumes the voice of her mother, Edith, who at age 12 is sent by her Jewish parents from increasingly anti-Semitic Germany to live in America with relatives. Edith's plaintive narration describes her father's mounting fear of the Nazis ...

A memorial statue in Hanko, Finland, commemorating the thousands of emigrants who left the country to start a new life in the United States The definition of immigration is "a person who comes to a country to take up permanent residence or a plant or animal that becomes established in an area where it was previously unknown." But the concept can encompass much more and much less than that. Immigrating ...

My mother's childhood home Most Germany homes are handed down from one generation to the next. My mother's childhood home in Stockstadt had been in her family for 200 years. But after the Holocaust, Nazis stole some Jewish homes; others became available for rent. In the Kreis-Gross Gerau area, one family who rents a former Jewish home has lived uneasily in it since 1978. "We wondered what happened to the ...

In another blog entry, I wrote that the second generation has the scars without the wounds of Nazi Germany. But, in his book Child Survivors of the Holocaust, Dr. Paul Valent claims that the second generation has the scars and the wounds. "Second generation children are dominated by the shadow of the Holocaust without ever understanding the original context," he writes."They were in some ways more vulnerable than child survivors ...

The lives of all the Germans I know have been defined by the Holocaust and its legacy. Some more than others. I have another friend in her 60s whose family has lived in my mother's town, Stockstadt, for generations. This friend feels terribly alienated because her mother made a choice after she had her only child: She decided she wouldn't have any more children because she wouldn't want to send ...

The first time I met the head of the German Society to Preserve Jewish Culture in 2000, I told him that my grandparents had 'died' in the Holocaust. "They didn't die," he said. "They were killed. It is a very big difference." Then he told me his history: "My father and grandfather were strong Nazis. I have tried to understand what made them partners in murder. The more I search ...

"The war and the Nazi period are like a relative to me," a German friend born in 1960 tells me. "For me, it's very alive. We were the first generation to read Anne Frank. We cannot think of German history without thinking about the Jews. "But our parents couldn't talk about the past. When we bring up the subject, many said, 'Stop talking about it. It's over. We have a ...