{"id":48069,"date":"2025-12-05T01:26:08","date_gmt":"2025-12-05T09:26:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/?p=48069"},"modified":"2025-12-04T09:15:40","modified_gmt":"2025-12-04T17:15:40","slug":"family-memoir-a-work-of-art","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/2025\/12\/05\/family-memoir-a-work-of-art\/","title":{"rendered":"Family memoir a work of art"},"content":{"rendered":"

Karen Bermann\u2019s The Art of Being a Stranger: A Family Memoir<\/i>, published by New Jewish Press, an imprint of University of Toronto Press, is a work of art. It is moving in ways hard to describe. It might not capture every detail of her family\u2019s history \u2013 in fact, wide swaths of that history are missing. What\u2019s not missing, what is powerful, are the feelings this book evokes.<\/p>\n

Bermann, who lives in Rome, is professor emerita of architecture at Iowa State University. Her father, Fritz, was born into an Orthodox Jewish family in Vienna. At 15 years old, he and his younger sister, Elsa, who was 10, fled Europe, alone, in the late 1930s. They were separated in Haifa, his sister being taken to an orphanage with the other children who were too young to work. Fritz, as lucky as one can be after losing one\u2019s family and home, ended up with a Russian farming family who treated him well. Nonetheless, at 18, he left the farm and headed off to live on a kibbutz.<\/p>\n

\"image<\/a>The way in which Bermann intertwines her father\u2019s words with her own commentary and descriptions is so effective. For example, when Fritz tells her about getting in trouble, at 10 years old, for writing a story about building a bomb to blow up the school, Bermann writes, \u201c\u2018Oh, Dad, that is really bad.\u2019 Yes, that was a particularly bad one. \u2018Were you always so angry?\u2019 I was born angry. And scared. As was my father before me. <\/i>\u2018Even before the Nazis, you were so angry and scared?\u2019 Well, yes. But the Nazis didn\u2019t help.\u201d<\/i><\/i><\/p>\n

This dark sense of humour permeates The Art of Being a Strange<\/i>r. Bermann doesn\u2019t sentimentalize or sensationalize, she just tells us what her father tells her and sometimes shares her reactions. We also learn \u2013 and feel \u2013 what she went through as Fritz\u2019s daughter. She writes succinctly, poetically, in both words and images.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

From pre-state Israel, Fritz went to New York City, where he worked in building maintenance. After an incident with an antisemitic boss, he found work at a company, where, over 20 years, he rose up the ladder. \u201cSomehow from being a peasant in Palestine I found myself a bigshot in the world of New York building maintenance,\u201d he tells his daughter.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

But New York never became, for him, a city of museums and operas, but remained one of crooks and bribes. Just like his Vienna wasn\u2019t the city tourists visited to eat sachertorte and go skating, but rather was \u201ca shtetl of poor religious Jews, a ghetto of ignorant bastards who beat their children for making noise on Shabbos, but who knew in their bones that they were not welcome, who recognized the stench of antisemitism in the street while others were perfuming their noses in the rose gardens.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fritz\u2019s trauma, inherited from his ancestors, is passed on to his daughter in full force. Yet, Bermann, as a teenager, would defend her father against her friends\u2019 calling him a Nazi, for instance. He was brutally abusive. She only talks about this in relation to herself, not others in the household. To survive, she built \u201ca parallel structure to the one I live in my father\u2019s house.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cFritz was ruthlessly (one of his\u00a0<\/span>favorite words) honest about the danger of hope. Hope was more than pointless, it was stupid, and led to suffering,\u201d writes Bermann. \u201cPeople disappointed by life were stupid people; they made him angry\u2026. He taught us about the strength of character that hopelessness required.\u201d<\/p>\n

In addition to sharing some of her childhood experiences, Bermann shares some of her experiences working, at the age of 19, on the rehabilitation of one of the more than 1,000 abandoned buildings on the Lower East Side that she and a group took over from the city: \u201cDitched by landlords who couldn\u2019t squeeze a profit out of a tenement in need of heat, in need of maintenance, a building that leaked from every weak pore.\u201d<\/p>\n

We meet other family members, we find out how Fritz\u2019s story ends. From fragments of a life, we see how complex we humans are, how many contradictions we hold within us, how we can be that which we hate, how we can hurt who we love and how we can love the broken, how beauty exists, sometimes inextricably with the ugly. The stranger of the title is Fritz, it\u2019s Bermann, it\u2019s us. Yet, experiencing The Art of Being a Stranger<\/i> made me feel more part of humanity, kind of like when we chant Ashamnu together as a congregation: we have abused, we have betrayed, we have been cruel\u2026. None of us is perfect, none of us gets through life unscathed or without hurting others. Yet, we keep getting up in the morning and living. Until we don\u2019t.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Karen Bermann\u2019s The Art of Being a Stranger: A Family Memoir, published by New Jewish Press, an imprint of University of Toronto Press, is a work of art. It is moving in ways hard to describe. It might not capture every detail of her family\u2019s history \u2013 in fact, wide swaths of that history are […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[784],"tags":[24516,53,7906,24515,22042],"class_list":["post-48069","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","tag-art-of-being-a-stranger","tag-holocaust","tag-intergenerational-trauma","tag-karen-bermann","tag-memoirs"],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":8}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48069","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48069"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48069\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48069"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48069"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48069"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}