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Tag: second generation

A story of two families

A story of two families

Marsha Lederman’s Kiss the Red Stairs begins in 1919, when her father was born, on erev Yom Kippur. (photo by Ben Nelms)

In the last couple of decades, researchers have identified traits that affect many children of Holocaust survivors. There remains much left to uncover, including how much is epigenetic – that is, whether and how the genes of people like survivors, who have undergone extreme trauma, work differently than other people’s – and how much might be a result of the parenting styles of people who, in many instances, were ripped from their own parents in the most brutal circumstances. The old issue of nature versus nurture, in other words.

While psychologists and scientists try to unravel those mysteries, a genre of second generation memoirs is exploring the deeply personal experiences of being raised by survivors of the Shoah. A page-turning, sometimes shocking and nakedly vulnerable volume has recently added much to the growing library.

Vancouver journalist Marsha Lederman, Western arts correspondent for the Globe and Mail, has written Kiss the Red Stairs: The Holocaust, Once Removed. The book begins in 1919, when Jacob Meier Lederman was born on erev Yom Kippur. The auspicious timing of the birth of this baby, who would grow to become Marsha Lederman’s father, portended great things.

“[T]his was an occasion, an omen – a very good one, the hugest of deals,” she writes. “This person was special, he was going to be something, do something very important with his life.”

Indeed, he did. He survived the Holocaust – the only person in his immediate family to do so and one of only 10% of the Polish Jews alive in 1939 who survived to 1945.

Marsha Lederman’s mother was also a survivor, and one who participated in Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation testimony project, video-recording her Holocaust experiences. This recording would become a touchstone because, despite the journalist daughter’s career asking questions of strangers, there were many unanswered questions in the family. This was due in part to the harrowing, abrupt response to a childish inquiry about the absence of grandparents, an early lesson that unexpected answers can have catastrophic emotional impacts.

Well into adulthood, Lederman decided to visit her mother during a snowbird retreat in Florida. But instead of sitting across the kitchen table learning about her mother’s darkest moments, she was instead living one of her own – delivering her mother’s eulogy. She had waited a day too long to fly south.

image - Kiss the Red Stairs book coverLederman’s book is the story of a family – two families, really. A family that in some ways never came together quite right, the author’s birth family with its silences about the past, and another that fell apart, that of her marriage. Kiss the Red Stairs, in fact, is a sort of applied case study in second generation (shorthanded “2G”) neuroses, as they distort the author’s reactions and coping mechanisms in a time of personal crisis.

As her marriage collapses, Lederman recognizes, on the one hand, that her responses may not be commensurate with actual events but are exacerbated by a lifetime of fears around loss and abandonment. On another hand, the undeniable anguish of her marital breakdown evokes an added burden of guilt, her own trauma juxtaposed with her parents’ experiences. Given what their mothers and fathers endured, do children of survivors have a right to feel the pain that other people seem to validly experience?

Lederman acknowledges that she was always ready for everything to fall to pieces. She inherited – or developed – an existential pessimism and a catastrophizing worldview: “The glass wasn’t just half-empty; it was half-full of poison,” she writes. “Or Zyklon B.”

The history that has formed Lederman’s identity was not imprinted on her at home only. It was in the zeitgeist of her coming-of-age as a young Canadian Jew in the 1970s and ’80s.

“The slogan ‘Never Again’ was drilled into us, implying – to me, anyway – that there was always the potential for an again, for another catastrophe. What would we do when the Nazis came back and came for us, like they came for our parents?

“This happened to us. This could happen to us again. I was one of the us. On some level I believed, from a very young age, that this could happen to me. I understood the need to be on guard, that we weren’t really safe. We needed to be on alert. Have a plan.”

For whatever were their good intentions, the organizers of a youth trip to Israel reinforced Lederman’s anxieties. Intending to instil in the participants the need for one solitary Jewish state in the world, they reminded their young charges that, in the absence of Israel, Jews would have nowhere to go should the need arise, “if the world once again turned on – or turned its back on – the Jews.”

She doesn’t disagree with the premise. “But the exercise scared the hell out of me. Don’t be so comfortable in that Canada you think of as home; you never know what could happen.”

That awareness of the unimaginable human capability for inhumanity had imprinted on her to the extent that everyday life became a gauntlet of inevitable disaster, misery the preordained endpoint of any happiness. When her marriage broke down, her reaction was extreme, “As if divorce, for instance, were some kind of death camp.”

Having consciously tried to eradicate (second-hand) Holocaust memory from its constant intrusion into her mind, Lederman finally faces the core question of her life, and of the book: “Could I possibly be a victim of the Holocaust, once removed?”

Now a mother, her obsessive worry has a new object, not only in terms of the world into which that child was born, but the potential for epigenetic inheritance. Will the baggage of the past be passed along to another descendant of survivors?

At the same time, Lederman is careful not to ascribe her challenges to the overburdened couple who raised her.

“I am not comfortable blaming what happened to my parents – and, in effect, blaming them – for my little problems. It feels self-indulgent, unfair and actually untrue,” she writes. What they accomplished after the war was almost as miraculous as their survival during it. “The fact that after such tragedy my parents were able to build new lives – purchase and set up a home, go to night school to learn English, buy a business, raise children – seems astonishing to me, as I contemplate it all as an adult. How on earth did they manage to do it, manage to be so normal?”

She quotes Elie Wiesel who, in 1984, told children of Holocaust survivors: “That your parents were not seized by an irrepressible anger … remains a source of astonishment to me. Had they set fire to the entire planet, it would not have surprised anyone.”

Elsewhere in Lederman’s book, Wiesel appears again, seemingly underscoring the legitimacy of second generation complexes by noting that it was they, not their parents, who were the ultimate target of Hitler’s plan.

“You were the enemy’s obsessions,” Wiesel told the children of survivors. “In murdering living Jews, he wished to prevent you from being born.”

Lederman confronts the reader with things she has learned from research, rather than from firsthand experience or from stories her parents shared (because they didn’t). The Holocaust experiences of her parents may be the impetus for her lifelong sense of danger, she seems to suggest, but the larger history of that era should be a warning shot for all humans – because it was humans who perpetrated everything that happened to her parents and to the millions of others of the Nazis’ victims.

In one of several graphic segments, she demands that the reader ponder how ordinary people could throw babies in the air and practise a merciless form of skeet shooting.

There are other psychological conundrums in the book. Reading her father’s journal of a trip back to Europe, Lederman confronts what reads like a cognitive rupture: her father’s love for and comparatively happy memories of Germany.

Rather than remain in Nazi-occupied Poland, young Jacob audaciously crossed into the belly of the beast, into Germany, posing as a Polish peasant boy, and got work as a farmhand, surviving until the end of the war. As a result, he took a perversely positive view. In a travel diary entry, he wrote, “I had a wonderful exciting day and my motto stands again forever: I will never forget you Germany and the peace and security I found here among these fields, meadows and trees in those murderous inhuman times of the year 1942.”

Of all the happenstances in the book – some life-altering and, in several instances, life-saving – there is a particularly poignant one that happened on her father’s trip back to his hometown. On that trip, her father found out that his parents had left a letter for him before they had been evacuated from the ghetto and shortly thereafter murdered.

“A Polish woman who lived there at the time, or moved in after the liquidation – I’m not sure which – had come into possession of that letter. There were photos in this packet and some other family keepsakes,” she writes. “The woman said she had held onto these items for a long time, but after so many years without word, she lost all hope that my father had survived; she figured nobody from the family had. She threw the packet away.

“What was that like for him – to learn that his parents had left him something: a declaration of their love, a wish for his future, some unknown secret, an explanation of what was happening to them? And to learn that those things once touched and left for him by his parents – a written document, photographs, who knows what else – proof that his parents had existed, evidence of their love – had survived, only to be discarded?”

On her own ventures to the blood-soaked continent, Lederman is reminded that the past has not passed. She sees antisemitic graffiti on abandoned synagogues, Polish youths giving obscene gestures to participants during the March of the Living. Lederman and four family members are paying tribute at a Holocaust memorial while a group of boys nearby chant something in Polish, something menacing that included one term she recognized: “Auschwitz-Birkenau.”

“It didn’t sound like they were expressing their condolences,” she writes.

After a lifetime of mostly solitary rumination and fears, Lederman has several epiphanies during the World Federation of Child Survivors of the Holocaust annual conference, held in 2019 in Vancouver. Here, she finds others who share her view that “the other shoe is always about to drop and the world is not safe”; “being plagued with obsessive doubt”; “a heightened ability – one might call it a curse – to observe and engage others”; “A constant expectation that someone is going to get you.”

There, she finds she is not alone.

“I had found my people,” she writes.

Format ImagePosted on July 8, 2022July 7, 2022Author Pat JohnsonCategories BooksTags Holocaust, Marsha Lederman, memoir, second generation, survivors
Life with inherited trauma

Life with inherited trauma

Dr. Gita Arian Baack, author of The Inheritors: Moving Forward from Generational Trauma. (photo from Gita Arian Baack)

Dr. Gita Arian Baack, author of The Inheritors: Moving Forward from Generational Trauma, was in town earlier this month to speak at the Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival and hold a three-day experiential workshop with the Second Generation Group in Vancouver.

The Ottawa-based counselor began her festival presentation with a quote from the late Israeli novelist Amos Oz, who wrote, “Our past belongs to us, but we do not belong to it.” For Baack, the quote underscores her message to inheritors of the Shoah – that “we were given life and an obligation to bear witness and honour the martyrs and heroes of the Holocaust. And that we also have the right to live full and joyful lives.”

“Generational trauma stems from devastating events which transpired before we were born,” Baack told the Independent. “In the case of the Holocaust, we have experienced it from birth; it is as if we were there. We carry an unrelenting sadness, sense of absence and betrayal.”

The ultimate question her book explores is: “How can we live a full life despite the difficult trauma we inherited?”

Prior to writing The Inheritors, Baack conducted doctoral research into the subject of intergenerational trauma and resilience, yet what she uncovered did not fit or go deeply enough into either. Often, resilience is described as bouncing back with support from others. But, she said, “You don’t bounce back from the Holocaust!”

She was resolved to unravel answers to these and other questions, such as why are so many of us resilient and compassionate despite our inherited trauma? Do we carry memory from one generation to another? How do we move forward, when the usual therapies for trauma have proven not to work for us?

“We are also faced with the difficulty of piecing together our family stories,” said Baack. “Much of our family stories are full of holes, unknowns and even secrets, our roots destroyed. Understandably, we have strong emotions but don’t know how to deal with them; for example, excessive sadness, fear of authority, worry, lack of trust, lack of safety, etc.”

Further, inherited trauma is often frozen, embedded in the brain stem, also known as the primitive brain – accessing it is difficult, but it can be done, she said.

Baack noted that ancient wisdom, the Bible and new epigenetic scientific research explain that trauma is passed onto generations in the DNA, and even the cells, for as many as seven generations. She strongly believes that this is the case if it is acknowledged and processed; if it is not, then it can take longer than seven generations.

image - The Inheritors book coverThough Baack’s own experience is being a child of Holocaust survivors, The Inheritors encompasses others who have been victimized: Canada’s indigenous population, survivors of the Rwandan genocide and of several other horrible episodes of recent history. The book also looks at trauma on a personal level, from those who have suffered as a result of natural disaster, an accident, economic hardship, the justice or education system, illness or loss of a loved one.

The intent of The Inheritors is to serve as a tool for moving forward, said Baack. The book is filled with dialogues, poetry and stories from people of different backgrounds. Readers are invited to explore their story, and there are questions at the end of each chapter to help them process that story and, in so doing, transform their pain. At the least, in the end, they will have a written story as a legacy to their descendants.

The Inheritors has had other, unexpected, impacts. For example, the conductor of the North Carolina State University orchestra commissioned composer and flutist Allison Loggins-Hull to write a piece for an upcoming performance and she has chosen to write a work inspired by the book – Inheritors Overture will première on April 5 in Raleigh, N.C.

The group dialogues that Baack conducts offer a means of validation through other people with similar experiences and various experiential tools that can help further a deeper exploration of their trauma stories, the “undiscussables” and the unknowns. Group participants, she said, are often surprised by the creativity, laughter and camaraderie that arise.

The Inheritors is dedicated to (and inspired by) Baack’s two half-siblings. “From my earliest beginnings, I remember carrying a great sadness for my siblings, Henush and Halina Arian, who were only 4 and 3 years old, respectively, when they were killed,” she writes. There was no information about the circumstances of their death or burials, “But their existence was real and has mattered to me in an extraordinary way. And so I don’t fight the sadness; I embrace it. It has a special place. I am the carrier of their memory. This burden is the most cherished of all my burdens.”

At the age of 4 or 5, Baack had what she describes as a “knowing” or “inherited memory.” A “felt sense” told her, even at that young age, that her siblings, two of 1.5 million children killed by the Nazis, had both been shot in the back. When she asked her father how her half-siblings died, he said he didn’t know. Nonetheless, the memory (and feeling) she had inherited persisted, and could be placed on a spot in the middle of her back, with a knowing that her half siblings had been shot in that place.

Her research revealed that the timing of their deaths was before gas chambers had been built, and children under 5 were regularly shot. In 2019, a tour guide in Krakow pointed to the very street where the children and their mother were shot. To Baack, it was a stunning confirmation of her lifelong memory.

Baack has been consulting and coaching individuals and organizations for more than 30 years. She recently founded the Centre for Transformational Dialogue to help individuals and communities that have inherited devastating legacies. She also has written a book of verse, Poems of Angst and Awe, published in 2017.

For more information, visit gitabaack.com. Baack continues to research inherited memory and wishes to hear from others on the subject. She can be reached at [email protected].

Sam Margolis has written for the Globe and Mail, the National Post, UPI and MSNBC.

Format ImagePosted on February 28, 2020February 26, 2020Author Sam MargolisCategories BooksTags genocide, Gita Arian Baack, health care, Holocaust, intergenerational trauma, mental health, second generation
Danger in remaining silent

Danger in remaining silent

Marsha Lederman (photo by John Lehmann/Globe and Mail)

A few years ago, Marsha Lederman went with her mother, two sisters and a cousin on the adult portion of the March of the Living, which included a walk between the two main camps of the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex.

“The march from Auschwitz to Birkenau was somber and sorrowful, but it was also so empowering,” she recalled at the annual High Holidays Cemetery Service at Schara Tzedeck Cemetery in New Westminster Oct. 6. “We were marching with a statement to the world and a comforting message to the souls whose lives had ended so brutally on those grounds: ‘We are here, we are still living, we are multiplying, we remember you.’”

The family group proceeded to Radom, the town outside Warsaw where Lederman’s mother had grown up. The man who lived in the apartment where she had lived allowed them in and Lederman’s mother recounted her family’s years there.

“It was joyous,” Lederman said. “We were still on a high when we visited the memorial for the Radom Jews killed in the Holocaust. As I recall, it was in a fairly large square and seemed a little neglected. We were looking at this lonely memorial, the five of us women, when a group of, I would say, teenage boys began chanting something nearby. I don’t speak Polish, so I couldn’t understand what they were saying. But I did understand one thing: ‘Auschwitz-Birkenau.’ I don’t think they were offering their condolences.”

She reflected on the way she responded in that moment.

“We hurried away and said nothing. It was a safe thing to do, for sure. But, if that happened to me today, I would not walk away. I am done with walking away. Would I have put us in danger if I had turned around and confronted those boys? Maybe. But I know now that the real danger is in remaining silent.”

Lederman is the Vancouver-based Western arts correspondent for the Globe and Mail. Her father was born in Lodz, Poland, on erev Yom Kippur 1919. Her mother was born in Radom, Poland, in 1925. All four of their parents were killed in gas chambers at Auschwitz and Treblinka, as was Lederman’s father’s sister and little brother, and her mother’s little brother.

Lederman’s parents met in Germany after liberation and had one daughter there before moving to Canada, where they had two more daughters.

Lederman reflected on recent antisemitic incidents in North America and Europe, as well as her own encounters with antisemitism and racism, including a harrowing verbal attack on an Asian woman on the Skytrain at rush-hour, an incident in which Lederman was the only person to intervene.

“We have a duty to speak up,” she said. “We have a responsibility. This is our inheritance. I never had a bubbe or zadie to hug me or spoil me on my birthday or cook chicken soup for me. There’s nothing in my home that was theirs. I did not receive a single heirloom. But I did receive an inheritance – a duty to protect others from hate…. That is my inheritance and that is their legacy. Enough. Never again.”

She recalled being stunned during an interview with famed Vancouver photographer Fred Herzog, who died last month. Chatting after the main interview, Lederman asked the German-Canadian if he had experienced anti-German sentiment when he arrived here after the war. He launched into a discourse on the “so-called Holocaust” and said Jews died in the camps mostly because of lice and because Allied bombings prevented food from getting to them. Lederman agonized over whether to expose the admired photographer, eventually writing the story, for which she has been subjected to a range of criticism.

“Well, I have had enough,” she said. “And I’m going to fight to tell those stories and expose antisemitism and Holocaust denial and racism. I am not going to be quiet anymore. I think of all that was lost in the gas chambers; all the lives, of course, but also all the potential. With those millions of lives extinguished, what was lost with them? Poems were never written, beautiful artworks that were never painted, the cure for cancer, for Parkinson’s, the answer to the climate crisis?

“It was not just the people who were murdered that the world lost. It was all of their descendants and all of their descendants and all of that potential.… I talk about this because of what this leaves on our shoulders. I interviewed a Nisga’a poet, Jordan Abel, and he used a term to describe himself that I have adopted. He calls himself an intergenerational survivor of residential schools, which makes me an intergenerational survivor of Auschwitz. I do not take this lightly. With my parents’ survival came a hefty responsibility on me and on all of us who are descendants.”

At the service, Jack Micner, who led the ceremony and is also a member of the second generation, outlined a litany of antisemitic incidents and comments in Europe and North America in recent weeks.

“I suspect that those of our parents resting here in this cemetery would be furious to see what’s going on across the world,” he said. “We have to continue doing the type of work that VHEC [Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre] is doing in as many ways as we can think … it falls on us, because nobody’s going to do it for us.”

Rabbi Shlomo Estrin reflected on the loss of Chassidic communities during the Holocaust. Cantor Yaacov Orzech chanted El Maleh Rachamim.

Names were read of community members who have passed since the last High Holidays and a moment of silence was observed for the six million.

The Mourner’s Kaddish was recited by Jeremy Berger, a grandson of a Holocaust survivor. After the service ended, the Mourner’s Kaddish was also recited at the Holocaust Memorial in the cemetery.

The annual event is presented by the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre with Congregation Schara Tzedeck and the Jewish War Veterans, and with support from the Jewish Community Foundation of Greater Vancouver.

Format ImagePosted on October 25, 2019October 23, 2019Author Pat JohnsonCategories LocalTags Holocaust, Kristallnacht, Marsha Lederman, memoir, racism, second generation, survivor, VHEC
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