On Writing

Living with trauma is like living with a smoker. You don't have to be the smoker to get sick. How can that be? Dr. Paul Valent, a psychotherapist for 35 years who founded the Child Survivors of the Holocaust group in Melbourne, Australia offers this explanation: "Children of traumatized parents especially young ones, experience their parent-gods as not recognizing them as the children that they are and only inconstantly tending ...

Haitian children I worry about the Haitian child immigrants. In addition to adjusting to terrible losses and a new life in a new land, they run great risks of psychological disturbances. I wrote in Is It Night or Day?: "Stories of other immigrant children often aren't featured in history books either. For many reasons -- war, famine, political persecution, economic hardship, natural disasters -- children have been painfully separated from ...

Haitian orphans arrive at Pittsburgh airport on Tuesday, Jan. 19, 2010. Once again, we are witnessing the painful realities of child immigration. The Haitian earthquake has torn apart families and threatened children. Throughout history, war, natural disasters, political situations, and poverty have forced children to relocate by themselves without the protection of their parents. No matter what the reason, child immigration reminds us of the daunting task necessary to rebuild ...

The Junior Library Guild (JLG), a literary review and selection service for children’s and young-adult books serving more than 17,000 school and public librarians nationwide, has selected Is It Night or Day? as a featured title for the spring 2010 season. From the Junior Library Guild's website: "Twice each year, our editors engage in this often-grueling process of reading, re-reading, discussing, and sometimes arguing, over the thousands of books submitted ...

Confusion surrounds my mother's identity -- not only as an immigrant, but also as a survivor. Ruth Gruber My mother and I attended a speech by the rescuer Ruth Gruber, who in 1944 was assigned a secret mission to Europe to escort one thousand Jewish refugees and wounded American soldiers from Italy to the US. Scanning the audience of several hundred people, Gruber began her speech by asking the group, ...

German flag American flag When my son was six years old, he pointed out a black, red and yellow flag on a plastic place mat that featured the flags from around the world. "Look, Oma," he said. "Your flag!" "That's not my flag," she told him. "But you're German." "I was German. Now I'm American." "But you're still German, Oma." She didn't see the irony; he had called her by ...

The late Iris Chang wrote in The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II, "First they kill. Then they kill the memory of killing." Her book documents the Sino-Japanese War atrocities perpetrated by the invading Japanese army in Nanking in December 1937. Many involved in horrifying crimes -- victims, perpetrators, bystanders -- often become unknowingly complicit in "killing the memory." They don't talk for decades. At a ...

The shadow of trauma darkens the next generation In Motherland, I described how my mother's childhood experiences defined me. I wrote about "the moment in which I was made long before I was born, the experience I never had but couldn't escape." How can someone have a scar without a wound? By either obsessively retelling their stories or engaging in all-consuming silence, both survivors and former Nazis transferred their traumas ...

Several readers told me they gave family members a unique holiday gift: Motherland and a recording device -- with the hope that reading the book would inspire the relatives to tell their stories. Reader Lori McCarthy, who is working on a project celebrating family stories and traditions called "Keeper of the China" (keeperofthechina.com), writes, "Your book has made our little family appreciate the many branches of our family tree even ...

Frieda and unknown girl, October, 1939 Some of you have asked me to post the picture of Frieda described on page 10 of Motherland. Here it is and here is what I wrote: "On the back of it (the picture) someone had written "9 Okt. [October in German] , 1939. The woman is standing, slightly hunched...with one hand on her matronly hip, and her other arm around a girl of ...