Holocaust Girls: History, Memory, and Other Obsessions [Hardcover]

S. L. Wisenberg (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 2002

This bracing and vivid collection of essays gives voice to what some American Jews feel but don't express about their uneasy state of mind. These essays creatively and sometimes audaciously address the question of what it means to be an American Jew trying to negotiate overlapping identities—woman, writer, and urban intellectual in search of a moral way. S.L. Wisenberg’s deeply ambivalent connection with the Holocaust reappears throughout these essays as she struggles to find a way to live with history without being swallowed by it.

(20020912)

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

"You don't have to be Jewish to be a Holocaust girl," Wisenberg posits in the first of her 24 perceptive essays, "but it helps." In other essays she speaks of the Jews' daily acceptance of the mystery of oneness with God, of visiting Franz Kafka's grave while attending a conference on anti-Semitism in Prague in 1992, and of a trip to Theresienstadt concentration camp, which is now a museum and where the tourists tote cameras and eat ice cream. Wisenberg, author of The Sweetheart Is In (2001), remembers how she and her sister hid in the closet of their Texas home in the 1960s, pretending that Nazis were looking for them, and how she regretted not having observed all the traditional Jewish rituals at her father's funeral. With her lucid style and power of observation, Wisenberg's insightful essays are gems not to be missed. George Cohen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review

"With her lucid style and power of observation, Wisenberg''s insightful essays are gems not to be missed."—Booklist

(George Cohen Booklist 20020620)

"Wisenberg has a good eye for offbeat detail. . . . She is an entertaining, self-aware narrator. A high point comes when Wisenberg considers the matter of Monica Lewinsky, reading whose biography, she writes, ''is like taking a five-hour call from your most annoying friend when you were fourteen years old, the one with constant boy problems.'' . . .Equal parts Fran Lebowitz and Leon Wieseltier: smart and satisfying."—Kirkus Reviews

(Kirkus Reviews 20021209)

“Anyone who gets meditative around the High Holy Days, wondering exactly what it means to be a contemporary American and a Jew, will find a caring companion in Chicago-based journalist S.L. Wisenberg. . . .The strength of this collection is not so much in the answers Wisenberg provides, but in the questions she raises.”—Forward

(Amy Waldman (The Jewish Daily) Forward )

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 148 pages
• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press (September 1, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0803248016
• ISBN-13: 978-0803248014
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.1 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.1 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,066,044 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars intense, fascinating, worthwhile, November 15, 2002

By 

Charles Patterson (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Holocaust Girls: History, Memory, and Other Obsessions (Hardcover)

This fascinating book of personal essays by Chicago-based writer Sandi Wisenberg covers a wide range of subjects--Holocaust subjects such as Herschel Grynszpan, Hannah Senesh, Margot Frank (Anne's sister), and Kurt Waldheim, as well as the author's personal and family life, her Jewishness, visits to Paris, Mexico, and Central America, Yiddish classes, Franz Kafka, and race relations in Chicago.

The book's title comes from her early years growing up in Texas in the 1960s when she and her sister used to hide in the closet and imagine the Nazis were coming to get them. "You immerse yourself in descriptions of horror," she writes about her childhood. "You stand in the library aisle in the World War II-Europe section and thumb through familiar pages. You stare at the photographs of the skeletons, compositions you've memorized. You watch your tears make little dents, like tiny upturned rose petals, on the pages."

Early on Wisenberg became aware of her distant relatives who perished in Europe. "The ones left behind in Kishinev, in Slutsk, in a little shtetl near Kovno called Pusvatin: great-grandparents and great-great uncles, cousins three and four times removed."

Wisenberg writes about her Second Generation friend in Skokie, Illinois, who reads to his ailing mother every day from Mila 18, the Leon Uris novel about the Jewish Ghetto Uprising. "His father was in Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, his mother was drifting through Poland on her own, twelve years old, and then surrendered herself at a work camp." With all of his grandparents dead and his parents speaking English with thick Yiddish accents that his classmates made fun of, he "felt like a stranger in this country, an outsider, outside the lives of other Jewish Americans." When Wisenberg tells him she feels the same way, he jokingly asks her, "Are you a victim without a Holocaust?"

The author's obsessive connection to the Holocaust gives this book its most intense and compelling moments.

Charles Patterson, Ph.D., author of ETERNAL TREBLINKA: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust

2 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Resuming the Lifeworld, March 20, 2007

By 

Rivka Similson (NC) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Holocaust Girls: History, Memory, and Other Obsessions (Hardcover)

While it is clear that Wisenberg's essays offer a personal, intimate account of the absorbing, traumatic nature of such a horrific and atrocious event in human history, her message to young readers is reductive at best. The "Holocaust Girl" who is imaginarily thrust into the role-call line in a Supermarket certainly has a right to be overwhelmed by the collective memory of which she identifies, and perhaps traumatically overidentifies. (I am writing a thesis on the Holocaust and see cattle-cars instead of trains). But Wisenberg's book unfortunately creates an exclusive historical identification that ignores the fundamental lesson of the Holocaust--that is, an obligation towards the other not as an object but as a subject. What kind of lesson is it for young readers to read about a girl so immersed in her own memorial suffering that she fails to treat those immediately surrounding her with recognition and compassion? This girl, wallowing in her own history, unfortunately misses the point entirely when she doesn't smile or offer her kindness to that check-out girl or that man in line behind her. It was that sort of attitude, which substitutes a myth for a visible reality, that enabled millions of Germans to look the other way as millions of Jews disappeared from within their midst.