Lingering Effects of WWII

Yesterday I posted favorite sentences from the first four pieces in the anthology Family Stories from the Attic. For more information on the book and to see those choice sentences, click here.

Today I’ll share a little about the next three pieces. Each of them carries the weight and lingering effects of World War II. Like that war, these stories touch down in varied parts of the world: New Guinea, Australia, Poland, France, Germany with American soldiers and families of survivors living stateside in Wisconsin, Missouri, Massachusetts and Florida. A slice, a small slice in forty pages of the anthology, yet it touches on individual after-effects of the war experience on these writers’ families.

In A Sailor’s Footsteps

In Julia Gimbel’s piece, “In A Sailor’s Footsteps,” she is exploring a journal her dad wrote in his retirement years, which the family discovered several years ago tucked inside a scrapbook from the war years which her mother had created. Like many WWII veterans, Julia’s father didn’t talk much about the war years. But in retirement, he spilled his thoughts and Julia realized “he was driven by the need to make a permanent record of everything he had never said out loud.” There is a poignancy that pulls us in as Julia realizes that her son is the same age her father was when Pearl Harbor happened in 1941. But her son’s circumstances, “packing his possessions and moving into his first dorm room” were quite different from her dad’s heading off to war.

Exodus Redux

Myles Hopper’s piece, “Exodus Redux,” begins soon after the end of WWII in Missouri. “In the beginning of the 1947–48 school year, I attended a Jewish parochial school with a name that took forever to say: The Rabbi H. F. Epstein Hebrew Academy.” At the time, Myles’s family lived in a six-family apartment building owned by his maternal grandparents. These same grandparents had emigrated to the U.S. from Poland in the early twentieth century, leaving their extended families behind. By 1947, it was well known that few Jews in Poland had survived the Holocaust. While Myles yearned to attend the public school he could see from the apartment, someone, most likely he surmises, his grandparents, wanted Myles and his brother to attend the parochial school, where their mornings focused on prayers, Torah study, Judaism and Hebrew. While he acknowledges the burden of his grandparents’ generation in wanting to preserve the future of Judaism and the Jewish people, Myles writes that he and his brother felt like sacrificial lambs. With courage, he never flinches from exploring his feelings of being an outsider at that school.

Tracing My Father’s Admonition

“Tracing My Father’s Admonition,” by Margaret Krell, explores the secrecy and silences that have colored the world of many children of Holocaust survivors. In a few lines that won’t leave me, Margaret writes of her father punctuating the news of telling her about the last time he saw his parents and brother with:

“And one more thing,” he said. “Don’t tell anyone you are Jewish. It’s not safe.”

So…there you have three more tidbits to tempt you to read Family Stories from the Attic from Hidden Timber Books. I am so taken with this anthology!

Available now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble and at Boswell Books.

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Lingering Effects of WWII was originally published in Pam Writes on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.