The Holocaust Kid: Stories

by Sonia Pilcer

A major work of autobiographical fiction by a second generation Holocaust writer--funny, erotic, irreverent, and deeply moving.  Zosha Palovsky was born in a Displaced Persons camp in Germany, the daughter of Holocaust survivors, but she has grown up in Brooklyn and in Washington Heights, joined a Latina gang, and refused to attend a yeshiva. She’s a rebel, outspoken, sexually liberated, and determined to live her own life, free of her parents’ past. Yet, as daring and defiant as she is, Zosha cannot escape. Her entire life is touched by the war. She has dreams of Auschwitz, falls in love with “her own private Nazi,” and has an affair with a kinky Holocaust scholar.  Obsessed with events that took place before her birth, she becomes a writer. By day she summons a "shlock muse in rhinestone harlequin glasses, cabana pants, and spiked heels" to write Elizabeth Taylor stories for the readers of Movie Screen magazine and, by night, writes "blood-eyed poems" about the Holocaust. Her parents Why can’t she get married like a normal person? How are they to understand their American daughter? With unflinching honesty and wild humor, Sonia Pilcer follows the Holocaust legacy as it courses through lust and desire, guilt and fear, and unexpected joy, revealing the emotional depths beneath the quest to free oneself from an ever-present past.

Genres: Holocaust, Memoir

192 pages, Hardcover

First published August 1, 2001

Reviews

[Edwina Book Anaconda · Rating 1 out of 5]

Since this book was written by a second generation Holocaust survivor, I had assumed that she was telling her parents story ... sad to say that she was far too busy telling the reader (in great detail) all about her sex life instead.
Highly disappointed as this was nothing like I thought it would be.

[Sonia Pilcer]

I look forward to hearing your responses to a book that took many years to write and publish. A Second Generation Holocaust survivor, a 2G, struggling with her legacy.

[Kristen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sonia Pilcer's volume of short stories, The Holocaust Kid, sounds pretty autobiographical. She's the child of Holocaust survivors, so her Great Burden in life is that every time she complains about her teenage angst, her parents say, "What? You have it so hard? Is this why we survived, so you could turn out like this?" As a teen in a gritty New Jersey neighborhood, she adopts a tough-girl persona, smoking, smacking her gum, teasing her hair four and a half inches out from her head. Moving on to young adulthood, she is "sexually liberated." (If, while reading along, a professor appears, a major cow patty lies just ahead.) (And no, no, no, I don't tell you these things so you can turn straight to them!) As she matures and gets more sensible, she meets others like herself, "2G," meaning the second generation after the survivors, and all of them are obsessed with their parents' concentration camp experiences. All of them create "art" with a concentration camp theme.

[tamar · Rating 2 out of 5]

dated.

[Judith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Children of Holocaust survivors