The Journey Home: Emerging out of the Shadow of the Past

The Journey Home is an engrossing anthology of twenty essays. Each one tells a different story about what it means to grow up in the shadow of the Holocaust and then to find a way of breaking free of the residual darkness of childhood by making a physical and emotional journey back into the past, to the «home» of one’s ancestors: the «home» they were forced to physically leave. Some of these journeys are undertaken with a parent. Others are undertaken with friends or partners and some venture back alone. Along the way, new connections are forged with the living and with the dead, with the past and with the present. Together with an introduction and epilogue, the book provides not only examples of the lived experience of being «second generation» but also offers some theoretical background to the stories and relates them to current and important themes, such as the role of acknowledgement, memorialization and commemoration. With eighty million people around the world currently displaced by disaster, war and famine, many of these stories speak for descendants of refugees and survivors of all such catastrophes.

Table of Contents:
Contents: David Clark and Teresa von Sommaruga Howard: Introduction – Journeys with a survivor or refugee parent – Janet Eisenstein: «Heimish» at last – Naomi Levy: Kraków: A visit with my mother to her hometown – Tina Kennedy: Lost in transportation – Vivienne Cato: Faraway country, faraway time? – Teresa von Sommaruga Howard: Living with humiliation: Reflections on a trip to Berlin with my father – Elaine Sinclair: Mein shtetele Turek – Diti Ronen: The only house that was built for me – Journeys without a survivor or refugee parent – Rosemary Schonfeld: Terežin 2000 – Marian Liebmann: Exploring German Jewish roots in Berlin – Vivian Hassan-Lambert: Letter from Bratislava: 1976 – Oliver Hoffmann: The dawn of realization – Diana Wichtel: Into the stream of history – Zuzana Crouch: Shards of the past – Monica Lowenberg: Black milk and word light: To Latvia, Siberia and back – Barbara Dresner: Only a two-hour flight, but it took me forty-seven years to get here! – Journeys undertaken for commemorative events – Merilyn Moos: «Opening doors» – Nik Pollinger/Pöllinger: I joined the dots and the dots joined me – Gina Burgess Winning: Haunted, or at home? – Peter Bohm: Three unexpected ceremonies – David Clark: Compass points in a nomadic life – Teresa von Sommaruga Howard: Epilogue.

About the Author :
David Clark studied anthropology, completed his PhD on Jewish museums in Italy and taught tourism and heritage management. He previously co-edited a book on contested Mediterranean spaces and is currently on the editorial committee of Exiled Ink, devoted to works by exiled writers. Teresa von Sommaruga Howard is an architect, family therapist and group analyst, focusing on the long-term effects of socio-political trauma. She has written and published extensively about all aspects of her work, which focuses on the process of encouraging dialogue in organizations and society.

Review :
«The Journey Home is a poignant and timely reminder of the historical junction that has been reached with the first generation all but gone and the second feeling the urgency of putting pen to paper before it is too late. Profound, moving and essential, this collection is evidence of the rich and enriching range of voices able to evoke the struggles of ancestors, while bringing to the surface inter-generational perspectives that reveal so much about the connections between past and present.» (Nick Barlay, author of Scattered Ghosts: One Family’s Survival through War, Holocaust and Revolution) «The loss of home, or more precisely, the loss of a place where you belonged to the human world, was perhaps the most long-lasting and pernicious effect of the Nazi destruction of the European Jews. No wonder then that the search for whatever remnants of it that can be salvaged will continue for generations.» (Göran Rosenberg, author of A Brief Stop on the Road from Auschwitz) «From heart-breaking to humorous, these stories of resilience and longing remain with the reader long after finishing the book. Tales of inherited grief and belated understanding, inherent in the second-generation predicament, provide a form of literary witnessing to the re-creation of intergenerational connections to places and people.» (Ruth Mandel, Professor of Anthropology at University College London)