Tag: Roger Frie

JCC Book Fest awards given

Western Canada Jewish Book Award 2018 winners, left to right: Roger Frie, Deborah Willis, Kathryn Shoemaker and Irene Watts. Missing: Tilar Mazzeo. (photo by Cynthia Ramsay)

Deborah Willis became a writer, in part, because it is a way “to learn about the things that you’re curious about.” Irene N. Watts and Kathryn E. Shoemaker were motivated to reimagine a decade’s-old story in light of its relevance to pressing issues of today. And, in his latest work, Roger Frie found a way to discuss a past for which, previously, “the words were missing for how to speak about it.”

The Western Canada Jewish Book Awards, presented by the Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival, took place on April 26. Self-proclaimed book lover Daniella Givon, who is part of the JBF committee and was chair of the awards committee, introduced the evening.

“As I looked for ways to enhance the Jewish Book Festival,” she said, “I had a vision that book awards would marry the goals of the festival with the celebration of, and support the achievements of, local Jewish writers from Western Canada and showcase the winning authors. Since then, we’ve already gone through the process of bringing the ideas to fruition with the help of a subcommittee and the first round of awards … a beautiful ceremony was held here two years ago, recognizing five best-deserving authors.”

This year, four awards were presented, as chosen by the selection committee of former librarian Linda Bonder (Victoria); author and librarian Elisabeth Kushner (Vancouver); author and poet Dave Margoshes (near Saskatoon); writer, teacher and critic Norman Ravvin (Montreal); and Judith Saltman, professor emerita at the University of British Columbia School of Library, Archival and Information Studies. The winners were Calgary-based Willis for The Dark and Other Love Stories (Diamond Foundation Prize for fiction); Tilar J. Mazzeo, who divides her time between Maine, New York and Vancouver Island, for Irena’s Children (Pinsky Givon Family Prize for non-fiction); Vancouver’s Watts and Shoemaker for Seeking Refuge (Jonathan and Heather Berkowitz Prize for children and youth literature); and Frie, professor of education at Simon Fraser University and affiliate professor of psychiatry at UBC, for Not in My Family: German Memory and Responsibility after the Holocaust (Kahn Family Foundation Prize for writing on the Holocaust).

At the awards ceremony, each of the donors, or their representative, announced the winner of their sponsored award, which included a cash component. The winners – except for Mazzeo, who could not attend – read excerpts from their books and were interviewed briefly by Marsha Lederman, Western arts correspondent for the Globe and Mail.

Frie, who seven years ago discovered his maternal grandfather’s involvement with the Nazis, told Lederman, “This was a past no one had spoken about and, as I soon learned to understand, I think the words were missing for how to speak about it.” About the war in general, he said, his parents – who immigrated in the 1950s to Canada (Frie was born here) – talked about Germany’s responsibility for the Holocaust, however they did not speak about what his grandparents believed or what their involvement was in the war. He has found, in his research, that this “is a common dynamic amongst Germans in the postwar period.” He said that, while Germany has faced its past, “the emphasis on collective memory and collective understanding and collective responsibility has, in some way, allowed individual families to avoid confronting the past, and this book [Not in My Family] is very much a representation of that.”

Lederman described Mazzeo’s book as “astonishing.”

“I knew nothing about Irena Sendler before I picked up this book, so this has been a gift,” she said. “Irena Sendler was a Polish woman who saved … thousands of Jewish children during the Holocaust with amazing feats of courage, often in the Warsaw Ghetto. Her story is incredible, this book is incredible, and I can only hope that Steven Spielberg gets his hands on a copy.”

Shoemaker gave a brief presentation on the creative process she and Watts went through to create the graphic novel Seeking Refuge, which is based on Watts’ book Remember Me (first published in 2000). And Watts spoke of the challenge of cutting 27 chapters down to nine. “What I had to keep in mind,” said Watts, “is you can get so carried away by cutting and changing the language to make it more dynamic that you lose the story a little bit, and I had to watch that I didn’t diminish the characters.”

About the cover of the graphic novel, which features a girl sitting on a suitcase looking forlorn, Watts said Shoemaker “told the story in that one image.” Later, in response to a question from Lederman, Watts said the current refugee crisis was “the major reason to bring this book back in a different format.”

As for Willis, she spoke with Lederman about her winning collection of short fiction. “I was writing the stories for about five years, and I actually started noticing that the word ‘love’ was coming up over and over again. I was at first a little dismayed by that because I was thinking, oh, love stories, that’s been done. But then I embraced it and I wanted to try and explore that theme in a way that was true to my esthetic, or my goals as a story writer. I set it almost as a challenge.”

After an open Q&A with the authors, JCC Jewish Book Festival director Dana Camil Hewitt wound up the event with thanks to the sponsors, judges, awards committee and audience.

For an interview with Watts and Shoemaker, visit jewishindependent.ca/meet-award-winning-artists and, for a review of Not in My Family, visit jewishindependent.ca/a-grandfathers-sins.

A grandfather’s sins

Prof. Roger Frie’s  Not in My Family rises above the merely personal (image from cenes.ubc.ca)

Forty-three years ago, at Vancouver’s first Holocaust Symposium, for which I was the chair, the keynote speaker was the Lithuanian partisan fighter Leon Kahn. His presentation to a large group of high school students described, among other things, how he watched, in hiding, while his mother and sisters were raped and murdered by members of the Einsatzgruppen – the murderous “task forces” mandated to kill Jews by gunshot (the so-called “Holocaust by bullets”) in German-occupied countries. Approximately two million Jews were murdered by the Einsatzgruppen.

After Leon was finished speaking, a tall, blond, blue-eyed boy walked slowly up to the podium. He was, he said, of German origin, and wanted to apologize to Leon. His face revealed how devastated he was. Leon shook his hand and told him, “Look, it wasn’t your fault. Now go on and live your life.”

That was my first experience with deutsche Schuld, German guilt.

There are literally hundreds of books and websites approaching deutsche Schuld from every angle. The author of Not in My Family: German Memory and Responsibility After the Holocaust (Oxford University Press, 2017) is Roger Frie, a Simon Fraser University professor and locally practising psychotherapist who is a third-generation German-Canadian. Based on his profession, he addresses the issue of German guilt in the present book from a personal psychological perspective, using his fear of being exposed as a “bad German,” along with his experience with inherited guilt, as his templates.

Frie’s Not in My Family was triggered, he says, by his mid-life discovery, long hidden by his family, of his beloved grandfather’s Nazi past. The book invites us to follow him as he slowly builds up the courage to go to the archives in Berlin to find the documentation revealing his grandfather’s Nazi membership and wartime activities.

“Opa” was hardly a high-ranking Nazi functionary, it turns out: he was “an ordinary German,” who operated, for all intents and purposes, as a minor motorcycle repairman. (Frie writes more about this apparently apolitical “motorcycle club” later in the book, but one is still left to wonder how the author, already heavily burdened with inherited guilt, would have felt if his Opa were discovered to have been say, a camp guard, or a member of the Totenkopfverbaende, the infamous Death’s Head Units.)

Ironically, Frie has professionally analyzed children of Jewish survivors, and some of his most intimate reflections arise from his wrestling, during these sessions, as to whether or not to reveal that he is himself of German heritage.

image - Not in My Family book coverConstantly throughout Not in My Family, Frie reiterates that he “has an obligation to remember the past” and, while remembering, he has many sincere reflections on post-Holocaust German guilt and responsibility, complicity, prejudice, cowardly denial and “shameful silence” of past issues, as well as, of course, the “need for redemption” and “the problematics of trauma,” especially of his own, rooted in a questionable notion of vicarious perpetration, three generations down the line.

On this last point, clearly, there was a therapeutic dimension for the writing of Not in My Family: it reflects on every page. But the book rises above the merely personal. For example, Frie is brutally honest in rejecting the moral camouflage of the “Germans suffered too” ilk, and on the need to be suspicious of Germans who feel “deluged” with the Holocaust.

Near the end of Not in My Family, Frie reflects that “writing can be a form of discovery, of examining life and making sense of the past.” This book, for him, he admits, was “personally meaningful” and “emotionally draining.” But if, as he puts it, the book “creates a space for dialogue and reflection on the nature of German memory and the Holocaust,” it is a valuable contribution to an ever-growing body of knowledge about how the greatest crime in human history came to be perpetrated by, among others, affectionate, family-loving, probably not dogmatically antisemitic, minor motorcycle repairmen.

Graham Forst, PhD, taught literature and philosophy at Capilano University until his retirement and now teaches in the continuing education department at Simon Fraser University. From 1975 to 2010, he co-chaired the symposium committee of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre.