I was born in 1945, the year the Second World War ended. At the time we lived in a mostly Eastern European immigrant community in Cleveland, Ohio. My mother emigrated from Ukraine in 1923 when she was nine years old, and my father’s family came from Lithuania in the early 1900s. They were so poor in Vilnius that my great-aunt Liz developed rickets as a child. Once my parents’ families settled here, they struggled to support themselves, live through the Depression, and find their way to the middle class. When my father and his sister Dorothy bought a duplex, Liz moved into the tiny third-floor-apartment. She figures greatly in my novel.

     I don’t remember my family talking about losing anyone in the war. In fact, they didn’t talk much about the “Old Country.” One evening my mother surprised us by describing a pogrom that came through her town during the time of the Russian Revolution. She said, “If we were lucky, someone from a neighboring village would run into town shouting, ‘They’re coming!’ So your grandmother would hide everything, including our food, and take us deep into the woods where your great-grandmother lived. Sometimes we would hide there, terrified, for days.”

     Unlike some families, where the Holocaust hung out in the living room, our living room was full of Aunt Betty, Cousin Susan, Uncle Harry, numerous other relatives, a black-and-white TV, and my mother playing mah jonng with her friends in the corner. 

     I was a 100% American kid and never thought of myself as anything else. I couldn’t relate to what I saw in news reels, movies, and magazines about the war and its aftermath. It all seemed like somebody else’s incomprehensible history, incomprehensible nightmare that had nothing to do with me,  and I had no desire to identify with victimhood and tragedy. As I grew older, I came to understand what happened in Nazi Europe, what happened to Jews. I found myself riveted to newspaper articles about survivor families who had recovered some painting or other property stolen by the Germans. I would sit at my kitchen table reading and weeping.

     Why was I crying? Recovering stolen goods is a cause for celebration, isn’t it? And why was I so stricken by the losses of people I didn’t know? Reading those stories, I put myself in the place of those survivors. I thought about how that one precious item might throw into relief the enormity of what I had lost – The entire world where I was living the life that was supposed to be mine, that held everything I cared about, that held the people I still dream about and weep for. It would remind me that the 9had the loss of that world threw me because that world had vanished, I was thrown onto the shores of some country I didn’t want to be in and a language I didn’t know. 

     Even though the Holocaust didn’t touch me personally, it is so present in the memory of the Jewish people, that the grief and loss are also mine. This explained my tears. With this realization, I began to write.