Description:
Berkovits brings a fresh perspective on the motivations and courage of a family who abandoned their former lives to forge a brighter future. This memoir conveys a teenage girl's view on changing her name, countries, language, and customs.
Brief description: Annette Libeskind Berkovits is an American author, poet, and scientist. Despite being uprooted from country to country, Berkovits has channeled her passions into language study and writing. She has published short stories, a poetry collection, Erythra Thalassa: Brain Disrupted; a historical novel, The Corset Maker, and three memoirs: In the Unlikeliest of Places: How Nachman Libeskind Survived the Nazis, Gulags and Soviet Communism; Confessions of an Accidental Zoo Curator, and Aftermath: Coming of Age on Three Continents.
Review Quotes:
"Aftermath is a gorgeous bouquet of a book, chronicling Berkovits' family's journey from Soviet Kyrgyzstan to Poland in the wake of World War II and the Holocaust, their subsequent sojourn in Israel and, finally, their gamble on building a new life for themselves in the United States. It is both a touching coming-of-age memoir and an inspirational immigrant story, an absolute pleasure to read."
-Andrew Nagorski, award-winning author, journalist and former foreign correspondent, director of an international affairs think tank and editor for Newsweek. Author of Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power; The Nazi Hunters; and 1941: The Year Germany Lost the War.
"Berkovits is sensitive to what it feels like to carry the burdens of history on the slim shoulders of childhood; to the dislocation and identity confusion of the immigrant experience; and to the ways in which a child absorbs parental trauma. Most of all, the book is a joyful celebration of the adaptability and resilience of childhood."
-Rabbi Rena Blumenthal, psychologist in New York City and Jerusalem; author of The Book of Israela; Former Assistant Director, Office of Religious & Spiritual Life at Vassar College and Board member of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association.
"In her charming and inspiring memoir, Annette Libeskind Berkovits, manages to combine terror, deprivation, desperation, hope, romance, and humor into an artful story of wandering, love, loss, and ultimately triumph. Berkovits' personal journey...mirrors the awesome and awful saga of 20th-century Jews. Berkovits draws the reader deeply into her sad, wounded, but loving family, even as she presents the full range of the modern Jewish experience from tragic loss to redemption and healing."
-Rabbi Phil Graubart, Judaica Director at the San Diego Jewish Academy, author of ten books, the latest being Women and God.
"Aftermath is one of those necessary books that provides a rare account of the lives of Holocaust survivors after the war. Most survivors did not repatriate, but the Libeskind family did for some post-war years. It poignantly depicts how this Jewish family negotiated the residual antisemitism in Poland as it tried to re-establish itself. An impossible feat, the family then followed the heart-rending nomadic path of so many survivors, moving from place to place until almost out of exhaustion, they settled in the U.S."
-Ellen G. Friedman, PhD., Professor of English and Women's & Gender Studies, The College of New Jersey; Coordinator of the Holocaust and Genocide Studies Program; author of The Seven, a Family Holocaust Story.
"With characters you genuinely care about, exotic locales, and edge-of-your-seat tension, Aftermath is the best memoir I've read in years."
-Barbara Donsky, EdD, International Best-Selling author of Missing Mother and Veronica's Grave: A Daughter's Memoir.
"Aftermath is both a personal and universal immigrant survival story of striving for the American Dream, but with an important subplot. Before feminism was a glimmer in Gloria Steinem's eye, there were girls and women like Berkovits and her mother. Gritty, intelligent, iron-willed survivors who, against all odds, made the best of the worst possible situations, stitching together a new American life."
-Alan Sharavsky, Author of Boarding School Bastard, A Memoir: Life in an Orphanage for Fatherless Boys