MY GERMAN-JEWISH GRANDPARENTS AND THIRD-GENERATION PREOCCUPATIONS: History, Healing, and Happily Ever After?
What is it like to live in the shadows of our parents' and grandparents' lives? What does it mean to "work through" their experiences, and what do we have to work through anyway? What duty do we have to the past? What responsibility do we have to bring it with us--or leave it behind?
Erika Dreifus’s debut story collection, Quiet Americans, addresses these questions and others as the author contemplates the experiences of German Jews before, during, and after the Holocaust. A Jewish doctor in Berlin treats the Reichmarschall’s child. A Jewish immigrant in the US army is assigned to supervise German POWs. Each situation is fraught with choices. There are no simple answers.
Erika Dreifus earned undergraduate and graduate degrees from Harvard University, where she taught history, literature, and writing for several years. She is a prolific book reviewer, the editor and publisher of The Practicing Writer, and the Director of Communications in the Office of Academic Affairs at CUNY's central office. Her blog, My Machberet, features notes about and links to what’s happening in the Jewish literary and cultural world.