Motherland: Beyond the Holocaust: A Daughter's Journey to Reclaim the Past

Title: Motherland: Beyond the Holocaust: A Daughter's Journey to Reclaim the Past
Author: Fern Schumer Chapman
F: 1703797
ISBN: 9780670881055
Publisher: Viking Adult
Published: 2000
Binding: Hardcover
Language: English
Edition: First Edition
Number of Pages: 208
Section: Biography & Autobiography | Historical
Condition Note: Clean, unmarked copy with some edge wear. Good binding. Dust jacket included if issued with one. We ship in recyclable American-made mailers. 100% money-back guarantee on all orders.
Publisher Description: In 1938, just before they were killed by the Nazis, Freida and Siegmund Westerfeld sent their twelve-year-old daughter Edith to live with relatives in Chicago. Edith escaped the death camps but was left profoundly adrift, cut off from culture, tradition, her entire identity. For decades she shut away her memories, until she realized that the void of her past was consuming her and her family. Then, with her daughter Fern Schumer Chapman -- herself a pregnant mother -- Edith returned to Germany.

For Edith the trip was an act of courage, a chance to reconnect with her homeland and reconcile with her past. For Fern it was a miraculous opening, a break in the wall of silence surrounding her mother's past... and her mother. A memoir as lyrical as a novel, Motherland is the narrative of a personal transformation that examines the legacy of war. It is the story of learning to live with the past, of remembering and honoring while looking forward and letting go. In the tradition of Bernhard Schlink's The Reader, Motherland probes a pain that shatters nations, divides generations, and outlives its perpetrators.