General

A letter in Is It Night or Day? alludes to the similarity between the Jim Crow laws and Germany's Nuremberg laws. Some book club members have asked me about that reference. I found this comparison of the laws in a Teachers' guide: It is highly apparent that Hitler used the Jim Crow Laws as a premise for the Nuremberg Laws. Both laws specifically targeted an "inferior" people by depriving them ...

Hadassah Magazine's review in the November issue: Is It Night or Day? by Fern Schumer Chapman (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 224 pp. $17.99) is a moving work of historical fiction based on the little-known One Thousand Children program endorsed by Eleanor Roosevelt, which rescued Jewish youngsters from Nazi Germany and placed them in American foster homes. Twelve-year-old Edith, her story based on the experience of the author’s own mother, was ...

Author Dinaw Mengestu I'm often asked why I write so much about my mother's experiences. Even though I never directly experienced the trauma, I inherited it. Journalist and fiction writer Dinaw Mengestu's new book, How To Read the Air covers the same emotional terrain. A recent New York Times article describes his work as "populated by exiles, refugees, emigres and children of the African diaspora, all struggling both to find ...

Gert Krell My German blog partner, Gert Krell, has responded to my entry below called My grandfather's life and death. Here are some of his comments: "Next time I go to Darmstadt to visit my grandparents’ grave (they are urn-buried), I will also visit the Jewish cemetery at Groß-Gerau and look for your grandfather’s tombstone. I deeply regret what my country has done to your family, that your grandfather was ...

Rwanda - Stories for Hope http://storiesforhope.org/ The New York Times Business section on Sunday, October 10, 2010 profiles Patricia Pasick, Director of Stories for Hope in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The foundation was started to help Rwandans tell their stories from the 1994 genocide. After his entire family was killed in the genocide, a Rwandan secretary general asked Ms. Pasick, who was visiting the country at the time, "What do I ...

My grandfather, Siegmund Westerfeld, was born in Stockstadt am Rhein on September 22, 1891. His mother, Sarah Westerfeld, gave birth to him in the family home that their ancestors had built in 1721. (I believe my mother, born in 1925, was the first child in the family who was born in a hospital in Crumstadt.) Siegmund was the third son. (Both my grandparents, Sigmund and Frieda, had the same family ...

Freiburg, Sept. 26, 2010 To: Christel Goettert Publishers re: Fern Schumer Chapman "Mutterland - nach dem Holocaust" I have read many books about the topic: memoirs from the Holocaust and after, including those from the perspective of daughters or sons of survivors. No other book so far has moved and occupied me so much, and I feel compelled to thank you for the publication of this text. I wish that ...

Author Jessica Stern From Jessica Stern's book, Denial: A Memoir of Terror: "...when observers become complicit in the victim's desire to forget, they become perpetrators, too...When authorities disbelieve the victim, when bystanders refute what they cannot bear to know, they rob the victim of normal existence on the earth. Bystander and victim collude in denial or forgetting, and in so doing, repeat the abuse. Life for the victim now begins ...

"Black Painting" by Stephanie Serpick (sserpick.com) A local book club selected Motherland as this month's featured work and invited me to participate in the group's discussion today. Each reader found her own way of relating to the story. One woman talked about how her mother was raised by adoptive parents who were alcoholics. (Her biological parents died when the girl was five.) "My mother didn't really know how to be ...

HickeyPicksjr From Children's Readers Advisory "In this day and age when immigration is a hot button issue for so many people, it is important to remember the suffering from which people are trying to escape. Fern Schumer Chapman tells a story based on her mother’s journey to America during the Nazi’s rise to power in Germany. .. a painful, but important book for a young person to read." From Mrs. ...