Motherland: Beyond the Holocaust: A Mother-Daughter Journey to Reclaim the Past [Paperback]

Fern Schumer Chapman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 3, 2001

In 1937, Edith Westerfeld's parents-before being killed by the Nazis-sent her from Germany to live with relatives in America. Fifty-four years later, Edith decided that it was time to, with her grown daughter Fern, revisit the town she had left so many years before. For Edith the trip was a chance to reconnect and reconcile with her past; for Fern it was a chance to learn what lay behind her mother's silent grief. On their journey, Fern and her mother shared many extraordinary encounters with the townspeople and-more importantly-with one another, closing the divide that had long stood between them.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

When asked to accompany her mother on a return visit to her native Germany, Chapman jumped at the opportunity. At stake was a chance to reclaim both her ancestors and her own mother, Edith, whose past as a Holocaust escapee had created an emotional barrier between the two of them. "She lost her childhood to the war," Chapman writes tenderly, "and, in a way, I lost my childhood to her." In 1938, at the age of 12, Edith's parents sent her from Stockstadt am Rhein to live in Chicago with relatives who treated her badly. Chapman, a former Chicago Tribune reporter, lovingly describes her scarred mother's decision to return to her hometown; the emotional catharsis and peace her return brings; and the various reactions her return engenders in the townspeople. (Some old classmates throw Edith a party, but others will not look at her.) Chapman's narrative is strongest when she writes as journalist rather than memoirist, letting the Germans speak for themselves. She introduces two gripping individuals: the town historian, Hans, who lives in remorse and humiliation because he failed to help Edith's mother; and Mina, Edith's family's maid and soul-sister, whose defiance and hatred of the Nazis raged in her until her death. Although at times Chapman's prose seems too sentimental, her report of a German town's reactions to a Holocaust survivor's return is moving and engrossing. (Apr.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Although people of the Jewish faith honor their ancestors by remembering their history, Edith Westerfeld chose to bury her past in order to survive the present. Westerfeld did not experience the Nazi concentration camps firsthand, but she still suffered because of them. In 1938, her parents sent her from Germany to Chicago so that she could escape those atrocities. While this guaranteed Edith's survival, her parents and grandparents perished. Fifty-two years later, Westerfeld decided that she was finally able to reconcile the past by visiting her homeland. Her daughter, former Chicago Tribune reporter Chapman, accompanied her, and for Chapman the journey was also a chance to learn about the ancestors she never knew. This well-written and moving book detailing their trip shows how the Holocaust affected not only the survivors of the war but the next generation as well. Recommended for all public libraries and for academic libraries with large Holocaust collections.
-Jill Jaracz, MLIS, Chicago
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 190 pages
• Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics); Reprint edition (April 3, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0140286233
• ISBN-13: 978-0140286236
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.4 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (29 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,324,285 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A "Must-Read", April 3, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Motherland: A Daughter's Journey to Reclaim Her Past (Hardcover)

Once you begin this book, you will not be able to put it down until you finish it. Chapman grabs the reader on many fronts: with a compelling story; with beautiful writing full of creative imagery and insight; and with lots of food for thought. Motherland holds appeal for many different types of readers. It is simultaneously a book about the Holocaust, the intricacies of mother-daughter relationships, and most importantly, the effects the past can have on the present and future.

I laughed and cried many times as I read this exquisitely-constructed book. And now that I have finished it, I continue to think about it. Motherland is very easy to read, but there is nothing light about it. I know it will stick with me for a long time to come.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars compelling, provocative and deeply moving Holocaust memoir, July 4, 2001

By 

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

This review is from: Motherland: Beyond the Holocaust: A Mother-Daughter Journey to Reclaim the Past (Paperback)

"Motherland," Fern Schumer Chapman's extraordinary memoir of her mother's pre and post-Holocaust experiences, sheds an important light on a special type of victim -- the escapee. The author's mother, Edith Westerfeld, was but twelve when her parents, successful and seemingly honored German citizens of the small, rural town of Stockstadt, sent her to America. This abrupt removal, one which was depicted with incredible emotional detail by Chapman, had catastrophic impact on the child Edith, a corrosive and numbing sense of shame and guilt which lasted a lifetime until a heroic decision by Edith to return to Germany in 1990 permitted her to understand her assiduously barricaded childhood, the town which was her motherland, and the one loving figure who emerges, nearly fifty years after the Holocaust, as the genuine heroine of the memoir. Chapman poses no easy questions in this painful memoir; her answers and observations, though steeped with hope and a yearning for both roots and family coherence, resound with the horrors of the Holocaust as manifested through her mother.

Chapman, in graceful language, describes her mother as an "escapee," and the author postulates that escapees may have a more profound burden than actual survivors. Edith's life is suffused with guilt and the horrific burden of denying memory. "When she was only twelve, she lost everything but life itself: her home, her family, her language, her loyalties, her identity...Like a member of an endangered species ripped from its habitat to avoid certain extinction, she was left alone to bear her imprisoning memory, the unresolvable grief, and the full pain of surviving. The author is fully aware of the unique burdens this has placed on her. Using the metaphor of Russian Matrushka dolls, Edith had lost the larger doll (her mother); for years she was alone, but when Fern was born, once again there were two dolls. But "the relative sizes were reversed -- the daughter held and protected the mother. I became her mother because she needed one more than I did." Fern attains maturity in a household cut off from its own history; she becomes the means to "restoration, restitution, resurrection. I am a replacement for her lost family."

Fern and Edith's journey to Germany in 1990 brings the latter face to face with her past and the former face to face with her mother. A class reunion, stilted and nerve-wracking, brings little comfort to Edith, and a profoundly shaken and guilt-racked man eventually provides companionship and an inkling to the ease at which the "good Germans" of Stockstadt became active participants or silent collaborators with the Nazis. It is Edith's former caretaker, Mina, however, who emerges as the luminescent figure in this memoir. The product of a poor family, Mina attained employment as a caretaker-companion to the Westerfeld family and quickly forged a loving relationship with Edith. Now shunned by her former community and living in a dilapidated remote rural home, Mina's life is consumed with memory. She exists as a negative image of Edith. The two are fused in their polarities. While Edith cannot bear to learn of the past, Mina cannot let it go. While Edith has repressed all memory of her pre-Holocaust life and has continued to live, Mina covets her hoard of the truth and resents anyone who would seek to pacify the present at the cost of washing away the horrific complicities of the past.

You need to understand that Mina is a moral giant. She continuously, at great personal risk, refused to capitulate to Nazi aggression against the Westerfelds specifically or Jews generally. As she eloquently and passionately proclaims in 1938, "I will never howl with those wolves." Fern, deeply struck by this simple, pure devotion to justice, inquires as to how and why Mina never relinquished her dedication to principle. Mina shrugs off any suggestion that she is different than any other German, "You cannot behave like this to another man. You just can't."

And, so, Mina is filled with a quiet rage against the quiescent, stable people of Stockstadt, some fifty years later. When her beloved Edith quietly suggests she let the past go, Mina recounts, with excruciating detail, the damage and depradations the Nazis and the town deliberately enacted on her, up to and including refusing her permission to marry. "If you were here and saw what they did, you would be less forgiving."

It is important to emphasize that this memoir is not about forgiveness as much as it is about understanding, and how understanding can ease the anguish of a submerged past and provide the possibilities for a genuine link between mother and daughter. Edith eventually confronts her guilt; she finally is able to comprehend, from an adult point of view, what shattered her heart as a twelve year old. "If my mother had been a survivor, maybe she would be grateful, and could have felt each day as a gift, every year as a mission. But as an escapee, she feels she doesn't deserve to live. For that matter, she's not sure she wants to...not without her parents."

The moral and personal epiphanies in this magnificent memoir are hard earned and soaked with tears. Fern Schumer Chapman does not dare generalize from her mother's experiences or pontificate about the value of forgiving and forgetting, of getting on with life, or putting the past in its proper place. To both Edith and Fern, the past is too profound, too precious, too precarious. Yet, by memoir's end, they and we realize that without the past, there is no hope for the future.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Motherland by Fern Chapman, May 26, 2000

By 

Hedy Epstein (St. Louis, MO) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Motherland: A Daughter's Journey to Reclaim Her Past (Hardcover)

After meeting Fern Chapman at a reading of her book, I purchased the book & read it almost non-stop. I was deeply touched by it, as I was by meeting the author, who is embued with warmth & kindness, which allowed me to share with her, a total stranger then, but no more, some of my profound & deep hurt.

Though Fern Chapman & I have written our respective books separately (My book: "Erinnern ist nicht genug, an autobiography" {Remembering is not enough}, published in German by UNRAST Verlag in Muenster, Germany, ISBN 3-928300-86-5), not knowing each other, or about each other, in two instances the author and/or her mother & I used almost identical words. The mother, describing her departure from Germany & separation from her parents, is quoted "...I watched them (her parents) become dots..." In my book I describe my leaving Germany on a Kindertransport (children's transport)& how "...my parents ran along the train as it pulled out of the railroad station in Frankfurt. I watched them get smaller & smaller, & finally they were just two dots & then they were gone...."

Elsewhere Chapman writes "...In a way, her parents gave birth twice to the same child..." I wrote "...I did not realize it then, but my parents gave me life a second time by sending me away..."

"Motherland" is beautifully written, full of sensitive insights. I hope writing it has helped the author & her mother to reach a new & deeper understanding of each other & of themselves as individuals.