No wonder Michelle Friedman became a psychiatrist - she started young.
A child of Holocaust survivors, she grew up on a Catskills chicken farm, absorbing a legacy of trauma, displacement, and family violence. In this illustrated memoir, Michelle weaves together hair-raising stories of her parents' wartime survival with vivid memories of life on the farm in Divine Corners, a remote Borscht Belt hamlet and an unlikely home for cultured Polish Jews raising three children. Her unflinching yet loving inquiry explores Jewish identity, resilience, and what makes one person break while another survives.
About the Author :
Michelle Friedman is a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and teacher whose life and work explore the art of listening and the resilience of the human spirit. Raised on a chicken farm in the Catskills by Holocaust survivor parents, she became a healer devoted to helping others find meaning and repair. A graduate of Barnard College, NYU School of Medicine, and the Columbia University Psychoanalytic Center, she holds the Sharon and Steven Lieberman Chair in Pastoral Counseling at Yeshivat Chovevei Torah and is also an Associate Professor of Clinical Psychiatry at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital. She maintains a private practice in Manhattan where she lives with her husband.
Review :
Apart from one historical work, the field of "Catskills Studies" lacks first-hand accounts of life on the chicken farms that once made Sullivan County the largest egg producing county in New York. Michelle Friedman's Divine Corners beautifully situates her childhood on her Holocaust survivor parents' farm and the surrounding local culture. Interwoven with her deeply reflective family history and her later life's work, she touches deep emotional currents of remembrance and love. - Phil Brown, President, The Catskills Institute, University Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Health Sciences; Director, Social Science Environmental Health Research Institute Northeastern University
Michelle Friedman's Divine Corners is a luminous, unflinching memoir of growing up in the shadow - and the strange grace - of her parents' Holocaust survival. With the insight of a psychiatrist and the heart of a storyteller, she shows how trauma echoes across generations, and how truth-telling and tenderness can begin to heal what was inherited. Wise, heartbreaking, and ultimately life-affirming, this book reminds us that even in the hardest corners of our lives, holiness can still be found. - Angela Buchdahl, Senior Rabbi, Central Synagogue, NYC
With a courageously honest account of the tensions and tender affinities in one family, Michelle Friedman has vividly illuminated a little-known Jewish subculture - the world of the scrappy Holocaust survivors who farmed chickens and plucked their eggs in remote stretches of the Catskills and New Jersey to gain a foothold in America. The memoir is shot through with deft and moving psychological insights into how the Holocaust continues to resonate through the lives of the survivors and their children. - Joseph Berger, veteran New York Times reporter and author of Displaced Persons: Growing Up American After the Holocaust
Michelle Friedman shows how memories of trauma persist through generations, as she courageously recalls them, both through her chosen profession as a psychiatrist, and by exploring her family's Holocaust experiences. Her powerful and engaging story shows that allowing ourselves to clearly recall such trauma can free us to respond in constructive ways. - Elaine Pagels, Harrington Spear Paine Professor of Religion, Princeton University
Michelle Friedman's Divine Corners cuts no corners as a moving and at times heart-stopping memoir of her family's halting efforts at renewal after the Holocaust. A psychiatrist by training, she places her family's story on the couch in a superego orgy of inherited trauma and personal resilience. Well written and marvelously observed, it is both a devastating portrait and an adventurous travelogue. - Thane Rosenbaum, author of The Golems of Gotham, Second Hand Smoke and Elijah Visible
