Click on a thumbnail to go to Google Books.
Loading... Displaced Persons: Growing Up American after the Holocaustby Joseph Berger
None Loading...
Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. no reviews | add a review
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 140,000 refugees who came to the United States between 1947 and 1953, Joseph Berger has captured a defining moment in history in a riveting and deeply personal chronicle. No library descriptions found. |
Current DiscussionsNonePopular covers
Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)973.04924History and Geography North America United States United States Ethnic And National Groups Other Groups Jewish AmericansLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
Is this you?Become a LibraryThing Author. |
So I bought his book to see what else we might have in common. It turned out there was quite a bit. His mother was from Otwock. My father's family lived in Warsaw and vacationed a few miles from Otwock in Swider. But those two places were really worlds apart.
His parents spent the war in the Soviet Union. My parents also spent the war in the Soviet Union. But their experiences, once again, were worlds apart.
And once in the United States, although we spent the first few years in New York (in Brooklyn, not the Bronx), we then moved to Los Angeles, and as everyone knows, that is a whole other world.
So, as much as we had in common, we also had very different histories and experiences. But so what? Berger's book is interesting, very well written, and in some parts very moving. Many people think of the Holocaust as the murder of six million Jews. But not all Jews were in camps. Some like Berger's parents and mine, escaped Poland and went to the relative safety of Russia, and their Holocaust stories are significantly different. Nevertheless, his parents lost most of their family members who had stayed behind, and my parents lost all of theirs. That we certainly did have in common. ( )