In this touching account, veteran New York Times reporter Joseph Berger describes how his own family of Polish Jews -- with one son born at the close of World War II and the other in a "displaced persons" camp outside Berlin -- managed against all odds to make a life for themselves in the utterly foreign landscape of post-World War II America.
Paying eloquent homage to his parents' extraordinary courage, luck, and hard work while illuminating as never before the experience of , refugees who came to the United States between and , Joseph Berger has captured a defining moment in history in a riveting and deeply personal chronicle. Elie Wiesel Packed with emotion, descriptive and introspective, this powerful and sweetly melancholic memoir, brilliantly written by Joseph Berger, is a remarkable tribute not only to his parents but to an entire generation of Holocaust survivors who, in spite of the burden of suffering they carried from Europe and its legacy of hatred and violence, succeeded in rebuilding their lives and dreams.
He recounts a story that is both tragic and uplifting. His journalistic eye for detail will make readers cry, laugh, and never forget his family's saga At last we have a second-generation voice of Holocaust refugees that defies stereotypes.
Tell us what you like and we'll recommend books you'll love. Sign up and get a free ebook! Trade Paperback eBook. Table of Contents Rave and Reviews. About The Book. About The Author. Joseph Berger. Product Details. But Mr. Berger's map of the post-Holocaust imagination gains important coordinates. Bush is the director of Jewish studies at Vassar College. Three children, brothers ages 5 and 8 and their friend of 9, wander away from their tenement and are last seen turning the corner from West nd Street to Broadway.
At least one of them does not know his own first name. We expect to read the conclusion of the story on the side of a milk carton. But the setting is the Manhattan of the s, and among the many surprises of this compelling and important memoir is the civility of the city, so much at odds with contemporary portrayals in our daily headlines and yet still easily within the reach of living memory. The boys, as Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel once sang half a generation later, have all gone to look for America.
The boys will also stop to peer in a window at 23rd Street, where the American Dream is on display in the form of model trains and Erector sets. Barely brushing the Lower East Side, they will safely reach their destination, City Hall, and return, still on foot for all but the final cross-town stretch. Jewish studies scholars have recently written of how the Lower East Side has come to be the site of American Jewish memory, even for third-generation Jews. Yet in this memoir, set literally within walking distance for these hardy kids of Hester Street, New York Times deputy education editor Joseph Berger makes a major contribution to the outlines of a distinctive Jewish American imagination by remapping Jewish geography.
In Europe, Mr. Berger's account centers upon his parents' experience among the Soviet evacuees in the Ural Mountains, a fearsome setting in itself, yet still at a saving distance from the extermination in their native Poland.
Thereafter, Mr. Berger will follow them westward to the displaced persons' camps and the United States. To make the Bronx not the last stop of the old immigration, but the point of departure for new Jewish American lives, is to chart a crucial agenda for contemporary Jewish American understanding.
To shift the burden of testimony from those who were the most immediate victims of the destruction of European Jewry to those among their contemporaries who survived the war in relative safety, however inhospitable, as well as their heirs, is likewise to map a place in the Jewish imagination in which a new generation of American Jews, distant in time and place from the Holocaust, might find room to tell their own stories.
Berger's European birth, immigration and refugee childhood place him somewhere between the vanished worlds of both the Lower East Side and the Polish shtetl and the typical experience of postwar, third-generation American Jews, who are his contemporaries. Thus he is especially well-positioned to make a gift of that map of a new Jewish geography. And he does. Rags-to-riches stories once integrated the Jewish immigrant experience of the Lower East Side into an American mythology dating back at least as far as Ben Franklin's first stroll through Philadelphia.
So too, in overlaying the Cold War upon the D. Berger integrates the account of his family's Jewish wanderings into the American story of his times.
On the one hand, Mr. Berger thus avoids a forced pathos. His family's own story in New York is never-quite-rags to far-less-than-riches. On the other hand, it keeps political and ideological issues close to the edge of his engagingly understated prose. Berger is not alone in his labors. Not only did he interview his mother, Rachel Berger his taciturn father is never forthcoming with information , but she also provided him with her own manuscript memoir written late in her life.
Berger quotes that text frequently and at length. One result of the procedure is to make it possible for him to tell three stories at once: the story of his mother's youth in Poland and eventually the Soviet Union; the story of his own "growing up American" in Manhattan and the Bronx and, finally, the story of the collaborative relationship between mother and son in their shared adulthood.
The incorporation of his mother's text in his own has a further, perhaps decisive, advantage. It allows Mr. Berger to foreground the very process of transmission. Indeed, it allows the reader to measure the distance between conscious recollection of traumatic events and the unconscious transmission of the trauma, a mystery that continued to baffle Freud at the end of his days as he wrote his study "Moses and Monotheism" in the face of Nazi persecution.
0コメント