My Germany: A Jewish Writer Returns to the World His Parents Escaped It’s almost a dichotomous memoir, this eloquent story of two generations tied together by more than blood. The subtitle–A Jewish Writer Returns to the World His Parents Escaped–is an excellent encapsulation since the book is the story of Lev Raphael’s childhood world, the world of his parents and their experiences, and of his adult world seeking to round out what he grew up knowing and not knowing. Yet this book is more than that. Raphael is the son of Holocaust survivors. Not surprisingly, though they talk about it very little, the impact of his parents’ experiences dominates their lives to the end. It also impacts their son. While leaving him crippled in some ways by the much-hated Germany–for a long time he refused to buy German-made products or visit the country–he also makes a living by writing stories about people during and after the Holocaust.
Then when he is sent on an author tour in Germany he is forced to realize that his feelings and his knowledge is not the entire truth for himself or for his history. As he begins to sort through meetings with the modern country that is Germany, with Germans of several generations, of the food and culture and music, and especially as he undertakes the extensive research to add to his knowledge of his parent’s pre-American lives and their experiences in concentration camps, he begins to find an understanding that not only reveals things his parents, especially his mother, never spoke about but that enlarges their world and his world.
My Germany is not a “Jewish” book. It is a powerful, sensitive memoir of one writer seeking hard answers to harder questions and in doing so discovering that legacies are not always what we are handed. :
Then the barriers of a lifetime began to come down, as revealed in this moving memoir. After his mother’s death, while researching her war years, Raphael found a distant relative living in the very city where she had been a slave laborer.
What would he learn if he actually traveled to the place where his mother had found freedom and met his father? Not long after that epochal trip, a German publisher bought several of his books for translation. Raphael was launched on book tours in Germany, discovering not so much a new Germany, but a new self: someone unafraid to face the past and transcend it.
- The German Money
- Children of the Holocaust: Conversations with Sons and Daughters of Survivors
- A Lucky Child: A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz as a Young Boy
- The Pages In Between: A Holocaust Legacy of Two Families, One Home
- Day After Night: A Novel
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