But the other reason for the long time delay was emotional. While I could handle a few hours of translation here and there, I was not ready or willing to dive exclusively into the Holocaust day and night for months and years on end—the commitment necessary to complete a book. I was thirty when I found Freuen, single, desperate for career recognition, restless in my then-dense bones. Even back then, I knew how hard this project would be emotionally, intellectually, ethically, politically. The idea of spending my days in 1943 felt as if I would be removing myself from the contemporary world, from being present in my own life.
Some of this certainly had to do with my family background. My bubbe had fled, was imprisoned in Siberian Gulags, and lived, but never quite survived surviving. She did not stay quiet but every afternoon howled her pain at her sisters’ deaths, the youngest just eleven. She swore aloud at our German neighbor （and the fruit store workers who she felt were cheating her）， she refused to take elevators because they were enclosed, and was eventually medicated for paranoia. My mother, born in 1945 on my “Asian” grandmother’s route back to Poland—a refugee before knowing what home was—also suffered from extreme anxiety. Both my mother and grandmother were hoarders, filling their cracked cores with bargain basement dresses, stacks of newspapers, and old Danish pastry. There was no question that my family members loved one another, but this love was intense—almost too deep at times. Emotions were explosive. My home life was fraught and fragile; the heavy mood lifted only by bursts of laughter at Three’s Company and Yes Minister, by comedy performance.
And so, I spent most of my early life trying to make walls, clean up, run away. I fled to different countries and continents, through careers as far as possible from the Holocaust. Comedy, art theory. Curator was the least Yiddish word I knew, and I wanted in.
Only once I was forty, with a mortgage, memoir （about this very issue of the generational transmission of trauma in my family）， and motherhood under my belt （loosened for the middle-aged spread）， did I feel stable enough to dive in. But this meant that I had to face the Holocaust from a new perspective. I was no longer even in the realm of the age of the fighters. I was the age of the people the fighters rebelled against: the people who would not have been sent left for work, but right, to death. I was stronger, but also, so much more mortal as a middle-aged mother, deeply aware of how impossible it is to judge responses to terror, of how “flight” was also resistance. Now I had to fill my life not only with gruesome accounts of the horrors of the Holocaust but also of the specific tortures placed on parents, unable to protect their starving children; stories of girls, seven years old, like my own daughter, whose families were shot dead in front of them, leaving them to roam through forests alone, eating wild berries and grass. It was not easy to read horrific tales of toddlers being torn from their mothers’ arms while I was working at a coffee shop across the street from my younger daughter’s synagogue preschool, especially as the nursery began increasing its security measures due to armed white supremacist attacks on US synagogues. I had to open myself nearly every day, alone, to these raw testimonies, still so painful, seventy-five years later. And now I was going across the globe, leaving my daughters, to get even closer.
Fortunately, the smooth landing at Tel Aviv Ben Gurion International Airport—yes, the same Ben-Gurion who had chastised Ruzka for her grating Yiddish—distracted me from my morose thoughts and launched me into Israel, so full of conflict, so full of life. Right away, the political and landscape changes struck me: the building development, the posters, the boutique hotels. I took a long walk down the salty Jaffa coast to help my jet lag （it didn’t） and prepare myself for six o’clock the next morning, when I would begin to work.
The most nerve-wracking and exciting meeting was the one I had managed to schedule with Renia’s son and potentially, her daughter too. After her “Renia K.” name in Freuen, and the book’s mention that she was living on Kibbutz Dafna （in 1946）， I visited online archives and tracked down a Renia Kokelka whose details cohered with the excerpts. I found her immigration file at the Israel State Archives—with photos! I found her Hebrew memoir. I discovered a genealogical report, which included the mention of a son, and a link to a condolence note after her death—it was from the Egged bus company and addressed to a Yakov Harel. Could that be her child? Was Harel a last name or a first?