Displaced Persons: Growing Up American After the Holocaust [Hardcover]

Joseph Berger (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 24, 2001

An account of how one family of Polish Jews, with one son born at the close of World War II and the other son born in a "displaced persons" camp on the margins of Berlin, narrowly survived Hitler's atrocities and managed to emerge anew amid the bewildering landscape of Manhattan's Upper West Side and the Bronx in the 1950s and 1960s. Joseph Berger recreates his parent's experiences in light of his own childhood among refugees in America. He illuminates the plight of 140,000 refugees who came to America between 1947 and 1953, through the eyes of a young boy. The book captures the poignant shading, the telling minutae and the stubborn intractability of displaced life.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In Proustian fashion, this memoir begins with a flood of memories triggered by a seeded roll, a staple of Manhattan bakeries that was an early childhood treat for the author, who, along with his parents and brother, was a Polish-Jewish refugee living on New York's Upper West Side in the 1940s. From the smell and taste of fresh-baked bread, Berger, deputy education editor at the New York Times and author of The Young Scientists, tumbles headfirst into a tale about survival in a new country that was dangerous and mysterious as much as it was a haven of safety. Written in simple, elegant prose, the book largely focuses on Berger's parents' lives (particularly before the war). His father, whose Yiddish gave the family vital access to the city's Jewish community even though the author viewed it as "the mark of a conversational cripple," is a quiet man who could be moved to violence when necessary to protect his family. His mother conveys to her children the complex tapestry of their European heritage. Both come alive in this vivid narrative, softened by a reflective somberness that is only occasionally tinged by nostalgia. Berger frequently interrupts his own story with shorter anecdotes in the voices of his parents, who tell stories about their families and their childhoods that both enhance and illuminate the primary story. By conjuring a complexly interwoven familial history that takes the reader across the boundaries of time, Berger lays the foundation for his thoughts about the larger immigrant experience. Agent, Joel Fishman.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

In this gripping and beautifully written memoir, New York Times reporter Berger tells the story of his family, Polish Jews and Holocaust survivors, who migrated to New York City in 1950. Having been born in Russia in 1944 and arriving in the United States at the impressionable age of five, Berger recounts with humor and pathos the tale of his own coming of age, with his parents' reminiscences as backdrop. The story of such refugees, about 140,000 of whom came to the United States between 1947 and 1953, remains a little-known aspect of Holocaust history. Berger's account is painful at times, as he recalls his own struggle to belong as both he and his parents fought to "shoehorn" their way into American life in the 1950s and early 1960s. His childhood remembrances of simple pleasures like Sunday visits to the bakery, the pleasure of new school supplies housed in cigar boxes, and the proud excitement of the arrival of the neighborhood's first TV set will bring smiles to the faces of general readers. Most touching is the celebration of family, community, and continuity so prized by these survivors. Highly recommended.
- Marie Marmo Mullaney, Caldwell Coll., NJ
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Scribner (April 24, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 068485757X
• ISBN-13: 978-0684857572
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,010,691 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

27 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Displaced Persons, April 10, 2001

By 

Math Reader (Palo Alto, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Displaced Persons: Growing Up American After the Holocaust (Hardcover)

I really enjoyed Joseph Berger's description of his family's Holocaust expereince. The book appealed to me on two levels:

Several family friends had been survivors but I had never known from the inside what their lives were like in America. People did not talk about their experiences. I knew that a number of my friends had parents with numbers tatooed on their arms. I knew that many of the children whom my mother had taught in the Bronx were from families who had survived, but I never knew how their wartime experiences effected their lives.

In addition, I had just read Helen Fremont's book on her parents Holocaust experience. In contrast to the Bergers who maintained their Judaism, Fremont's parents totally denied their religion, converted to Catholicism, and never told their children that they were originally Jewish. Although I really enjoyed the Freemont book I was disturbed by, but understood her parents denial. Helen's parent's wanted to protect their children and this was the only way they could think to protect them. In Berger's book I found a sense of hope and renewal---even though his parents had undergone terrible experiences in Europe, they were able to emerge with a degree of faith and this left me with a sense of hope for the future.

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars sensitive, poignant memoir about Holocaust/American roots, August 11, 2002

By 

Bruce J. Wasser (Lake Bluff, IL) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Displaced Persons : Growing Up American After the Holocaust (Hardcover)

New York Times journalist Joseph Berger has created a masterful, evocative and moving account of the ever-present duality of his life: his identity as an acculturated American child of Holocaust survivors. This duality gives his account of his mother's life and his own evolution from a bewildered refugee child into an accomplished American a poignancy and power. "Displaced Persons" will stand as an important contribution, not only to our understanding of the long-term implications of being a survivor of the Holocaust, but of the unique burdens, pressures and responsibilities children of survivors inherit from their parents.

Berger is acutely aware of "the unmentioned sorrow that was the subtext to everything [his] parents said or did." Haunted by memories, devastated by enormous loss, handicapped by their arrival in America in their twenties and driven to provide security for their families, Holocaust survivors often perceive their children as replacements of beloved family members who perished and as repositories of hopes and dreams denied them. Worried about their children's safety, happiness and future, Berger muses about his parents' perspective, "What could I say about the dread and suspicion with which they encountered a world that had proven maliciously fickle?"

As the author emerges from childhood, he begins to chafe from his mother's protective, controlling instincts and desires to assert himself as his own man. Berger's wrenching analysis of his status becomes the overarching theme of his memoir. "I saw myself now an an American...I would no more be the timid refugee boy with one leg planted in the fearful shtetls of Poland, with a mother ever vigilant that no more perils come to the remnants of her kin." It is this unspoken loving tension between Joseph and his mother, Rachel, that gives "Persons" its dynamism.

Alternating between two narratives, one his own and the other the gripping account of his mother's survival, Berger deftly intermingles past and present. Aware of his distinct heritage, the young Berger recognizes others in his impoverished Manhattan neighborhood who share his background. "We knew one another, knew in our young bellies that our parents were the same dazed and damaged lot, had the same refugee awkwardness, the same whiff about them of marrow bones and carp." Now attempting to wrest coherence in America, Holocaust survivors tend to frustrate Berger with their problem solving techniques. Berger prefers the American way of standing up directly; survivors "were always scraping by on a willingness to do what was necessary to survive, even if that meant surrendering pride or principle."

Raw emotion floods "Displaced Persons." Rachel's symbolic mourning of a dead child in Warsaw at the onset of World War II serves to remind us that she has no "mental picture" of the actual murder of her family. Unspoken grief undulates throughout the memoir. Berger's stoic father Marcus scarcely articulates his unfathomable sense of loss; nearly half a century passes before he can utter the names of his sisters. Guilt ebbs and flows in Rachel's description of her survival. Anguished over refusing to bring non-kosher food to her hungry brother during World War II, she has never forgiven heself, calling it "the worst thing I ever did in my life."

Yet life surges and humor emerges in Berger's descriptions of growing up in New York City in the 1950s and 60s. With both parents working at dreary, tiring jobs, the author experiences a freedom of movement he admits he would never conceive of allowing his own daughter today. His descriptions of his initial exploration of Manhattan reveal the sheer joy of discovery, the incredible exuberance of youthful hopes and the awesome sense of possibilities Berger recognizes in his new home. Berger's frantic disposal of an illicit girlie magazine carries universal appeal; he becomes an American everyboy. His struggles with self-confidence, academic competition and sexual frustrations are those of not only his generation, but of those before and after.

Written with conviction and compassion, "Displaced Persons" is that kind of memoir that not only describes, but instructs. Through the author's descriptions of his resolute, stubborn and proud mother, survivors attain an identity beyond that of suffering and loss. His own life's story shapes our understanding of the purpose of our national experience and the sacredness of an American identity. Treating both the Holocuast in its past brutality and its implications for the second-generation children of survivors, the memoir blends sorrow and joy, heartache and hope, pain and redemption.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Displaced Persons: "From the Particular to the Universal", July 29, 2001

By 

Penny (Matawan, NJ United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Displaced Persons: Growing Up American After the Holocaust (Hardcover)

This book resonates on many levels. It is a compelling and vivid narrative detailing the acculturation of Holocaust survivors in New York City, specifically, during the immediate post-war period. But this is no dry text. You feel the bewilderment of these brave souls as they desperately try to make a home for themselves in their newly adopted country while, at the same time, deal with the perpetual anguish of searing, catastrophic loss of family, country, and hope (or faith, or optimism). This is all presented through the lens of the author's memory in a series of poignant vignettes, capturing just the right detail to press itself into your heart, time and time again. From the particulars of these experiences, it deepened my understanding for what my own mother went through when she immigrated -- she is considered a Holocaust survivor because she experienced Kristallnacht in Vienna, but she was fortunate enough to have come to America pre-war -- and strengthened my compassion, empathy, sense of kinship and profound respect for all survivors of catastrophe due to war, or abuse, or illness, etc., who have nonetheless managed to make reasonable and productive lives for themselves. So...get the book and treasure it!