The son of Holocaust survivors journeys to a poisoned land in this memoir about shaking off family ghosts. Lev Raphael grew up loathing everything German. A son of Holocaust survivors, haunted by his parents' suffering and traumatic losses under Nazi rule, he was certain that Germany was one place in the world he would never visit. Those feelings shaped his Jewish and gay identity, his life, and his career. Then the barriers of a lifetime began to come down, as revealed in this moving memoir. After his mother's death, while researching her war years, Raphael found a distant relative...Read more
The son of Holocaust survivors journeys to a poisoned land in this memoir about shaking off family ghosts. Lev Raphael grew up loathing everything German. A son of Holocaust survivors, haunted by his parents' suffering and traumatic losses under Nazi rule, he was certain that Germany was one place in the world he would never visit. Those feelings shaped his Jewish and gay identity, his life, and his career. Then the barriers of a lifetime began to come down, as revealed in this moving memoir. After his mother's death, while researching her war years, Raphael found a distant relative living in the very city where she had been a slave laborer. What would he learn if he actually traveled to the place where his mother had found freedom and met his father? Not long after that epochal trip, a German publisher bought several of his books for translation. Raphael was launched on book tours in Germany, discovering not so much a new Germany, but a new self: someone unafraid to face the past and transcend it.
- ISBN10 1282270567
- ISBN13 9781282270565
- Publish Date 1 January 2009
- Publish Status Active
- Out of Print 9 June 2015
- Publish Country US
- Imprint University of Wisconsin Press
- Format eBook
- Pages 224
- Language English