Grace Feuerverger is the author of the new memoir Winter Light: A Memoir of a Child of Holocaust Survivors. Her other books include Oasis of Dreams. She is professor emerita of education and ethnography at the University of Toronto, and she lives in Berkeley and in Toronto.
Q: What inspired you to write this memoir, and how was the book’s title chosen?
A: Actually, Deborah, this is a much more interesting question than you may think because I never, ever intended to write this memoir.
Winter Light was not supposed to have been written – let alone published. I have broken all the rules that dominated my bleak family life when I was growing up. But I feel as if I was compelled by some mysterious force to write my story in order to add a somewhat different piece to the mosaic of Holocaust literature.
Because, you see, it wasn’t the language and culture of my people that saved me; it was the language and culture of strangers. At the core of my story stands a little girl struggling to find a path toward the Life force and to escape from the demons of despair that permeated her home. My memoir is about a sequence of serendipitous “rescues”—an emotional rags-to-riches story.
I’d also like to emphasize that my book Winter Light is unusual in that most Holocaust memoirs that have so far been published are, for the most part, from families who had enjoyed some measure of social and professional opportunities before the war.
Those stories depict survivors as heroically determined to rebuild their lives after the war despite their devastating losses, and they encouraged their children to live as fully as possible in their new society.
My memoir stands in stark contrast to these, in that my parents had never known anything other than blinding poverty, visceral antisemitism, lack of any educational opportunities before the war. So they had no role models they could fall back on after the war.
About the title: When I was a child, I was mesmerized by a shimmering light that seemed to call to me on winter mornings through the “Jack Frost” designs on our kitchen window.
It was simply magnificent to see the sun glowing against the bright-blue sky and on the freshly fallen snow on those bitter cold winter days in Montréal. The crystalline designs on the windowpane were like a roadmap pointing me toward new horizons. I really mean it.
In my mind I thought I heard a whisper: “You belong in this light, you will find your place in it; just follow the light.” So it made sense that this should be my title because that winter light uplifted me and offered me a path forward toward a life worth living.
Q: How would you describe your relationship with your parents?
A: My parents arrived in Montréal in 1948 – penniless, emotionally broken, carrying with them all the ghosts of their murdered relatives. I was born several years later.
With an emotionally unstable mother and a father consumed by sorrow and inner rage, I was always searching for shelter. And I knew from the start that my home was the last place on earth I would find it.
Neither of my parents were able to encourage my own ambitions as I was growing up. And yet I was a child really eager to be out there in the world. But at every turn I had to battle those “demons” hissing their frightening, grim messages.
How dare you? was the mantra that reverberated in my home. I felt like a traitor. And sometimes—in the dead of night—I still do.
When a very wise and compassionate therapist, one of my serendipitous rescues, explained all this to me years later, I felt as if an enormous weight of guilt had been lifted off my shoulders. Suddenly I could begin to see my parents more clearly and to realize that it hadn’t been my fault — which is what all children coming from places of trauma feel.
Q: The writer Nora Gold said of the book, “Winter Light is a frank, intelligent, and well-written memoir that charts the inner journey of a daughter of Holocaust survivors and her struggle to find a path forward for herself, from the darkness she inherited into the light of a meaningful, love-filled life.” What do you think of that description?
A: Nora’s description fits very well. It makes it clear that she thinks it’s truly a worthwhile experience to read my book. I appreciate it very much.
All the endorsements on the back cover (and inside) offer interesting thoughts about Winter Light. Adam Hochschild’s blurb is one of my favorites as well. It’s hard to choose because they are all so heartfelt. The Kirkus Review on the front cover expresses it very lyrically.
Q: What impact did it have on you to write this book, and what do you hope readers take away from it?
A: Writing Winter Light has helped me better understand my parents’ suffering and how and why it affected me so deeply. My relationship with my mother was difficult and unsatisfying. She never understood me at all.
Perhaps she just couldn’t accept my longing to be out there in the world, given how deprived and shattered her own family life had been. It’s a loss that I will carry with me forever.
But, through the writing of this memoir I now realize how much I am my father’s daughter. He would take me to the local public library when I was very young and show me the children’s section (all those wonderful fairy tales that beckoned to me!) and then he would bring me over to the adult section and tell me that when I’m older I will be able to read those books.
He was an avid reader (especially of history and political science), an intellectual and a terrific political analyst, a self-taught man who could have been a professor, or a writer or a politician.
Unfortunately he was denied a proper education, as I’ve already mentioned, and just soldiered on with a job as a bookkeeper in order to make a living to keep the family afloat.
This kind of job gave him no satisfaction. He escaped into his reading as often as he could. I could sense that he carried a lot of sadness about this for the rest of his life – on top of the endless sorrow about the murder of his family members.
After having written this memoir I feel as if I have been living out my father’s dream in my professional life as a professor, researcher, and writer. It is a bittersweet feeling.
Of course there are other children of Holocaust survivors who lived in emotionally and socially deprived circumstances as I did, but I don’t think they have written about it. Not yet. Not published.
So I hope that my memoir will lend voice to their experiences and to speak for all children coming from places of trauma – be it abuse, poverty, war, isolation, and other oppressions.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I am beginning to work on a very different kind of book: a book of historical fiction. I won’t say more because I don’t want to jinx it, but my mind is already deeply immersed in it. I will say that it is also about World War II, but from a very different perspective.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: Well, I would like people to know that I have also written academic books, and the one I’d most like to mention is Oasis of Dreams: Teaching and Learning Peace in a Jewish-Palestinian Village in Israel (2001), which is as relevant today as when it was published. It’s an ethnographic study which I conducted over a nine-year period.
Oasis of Dreams is filled with narrative portraits of some remarkable educators who are working together on an everyday journey toward reconciliation and peaceful coexistence – which they continue to do up until the present moment.
In fact, it was in the process of interviewing these villagers filled with their trauma and pain and hope that I began to share my own story with them. This opened the door to my going a step further and discussing my life as a child of Holocaust survivors with my graduate students at the University of Toronto. They began to encourage me to write down my story.
It was as if they gave me permission to begin to write Winter Light, bit by bit over a good many years. I owe them so much.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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