No comments about From Out of the Firestorm: A Memoir of the Holocaust.

2 comments about The Gift.

1. The Gift is one woman's journey to find an answer from the horror of the past. It is a quest to bring to rest the guilt of the next generation, the children of the survivors and refugees "surrounded by immense family of ghosts...with eyes that shine out of single saved photographs." Instead of rejoicing in being the of the ones who managed to survive the Holocaust, she is trapped in a search for meaning and acceptance.
   
   Seen through the cycle of the seasons, she, the first person narrator, tries to put the past, not to rest, but to life. She searches through time and place, religions and philosophies for the answers to unknown questions. She has embarked on a pursuit of the past. Her personal path is smoothed by the study of Buddhism, not as a denial of her Jewish heritage but as a means of explanation and acceptance.
   She can not find comfort among her own peers for she sees those who are children of refugees and those who are not as very different, "She had gloves on her hands and I had blood in my pockets."
   
   "In attempting to escape it we open doors we never would have opened.
   In confronting it we see what absolute bliss a normal life in peacetime is.
   In returning to it, our selves, our parents, our people, we become quintessential Jews who choose the fate of our people. We choose Auschwitz with our people and attain nobility through that choice. One's self respect hinges on the ability and desire to go with one's people wherever they go....the recognition that one would be willing to sacrifice everything in the face of doom."
   
   The gift is the acceptance and the ability of the children of the survivors to give voice to the pain that their parents feel but can not put into words, "to not have wounds but to feel that pain is a great gift." Willen has written with a bravery that is unexpected. She has been able to confront the confusion, the onus of innocence of a population who has not been acknowledged by the post Holocaust world. The burden of the survivor is to face a part of history that will never end. The Gift is in a material sense a very short memoir at 100 pages but in a true sense it is infinite. It is a work that deserves study and contemplation. Its multilayers of understanding, of comparison and of discussion will make it a fiction legacy.



2. When I started reading "The Gift," I wondered what Ita Willen was getting at. She wandered in and out of cities, years, travels, families, dreams. Though her meanderings were eloquently expressed, I became distracted. I flipped back and forth between the photos of the author's grandmother on the front cover, and the child Ita two pages in, so that one was superimposed on the other. It was the same face. They shared a name. She had never known her grandmother, who died in a Nazi death camp, and this book had presented their eerie resemblance so artfully that I wanted her to tell me, right away, who the woman was and what her life and death meant. I was restless.
   
   Then I realized that it was the author who had been restless; for most of her life she had defined her identity as a child of Holocaust survivors by trying to escape -- as though, in wandering foreign streets and philosophies, her path would trace an outline that she might call a self-portrait. She eventually discovered that she needed to see the face itself -- her own face with those of her lost family superimposed. In daring to step inside the outline, she found that the knowledge that had terrorized her all her life was actually a gift.
   
   I once knew a man who had survived Auschwitz. When his daughter was growing up -- innocent of the awful truth and needing his protection -- he told her that the numbers tattooed on his arm were the way he remembered his phone number. In telling me this, he gave me a gift -- a personal story to make real one of the millions of victims, who were otherwise an impenetrable mass.
   
   In "The Gift," the author tells us the stories that led her to understand who she was. Take this journey patiently. Every portraitist needs to sketch in the outline first.

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1 comments about For the People I Love and Can't Forget.

1. I had the pleasure of meeting the author of this book, Maria Szapszewicz, at the Jewish Center in Saint Louis; she was telling her story at the center and it was touching to hear her story. I am so glad Maria has had the opportunity to publish her poems and her story. I have been moved by the poem, "They Left The Shoes"......as I read the poem, I could hear Maria's voice from when she recited the poem at the center.....touching! Thank you, Maria, for freeing your voice.
   A must read for all!!!

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No comments about The Hiding Place (Hendrickson Classic Biographies).

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No comments about The Three Tragic Heroes of the Vilnius Ghetto: Witenberg, Sheinbaum, Gens.