Broken Brids

Click below for Katzir's most recent interview
http://www.book-club-queen.com/jeanette-katzir.html

Click here for an article by Jeannette Katzir seen in sdjewishworld.htm

Click here to read a book review from
Womensmemoirs.com

Click here to read a book review from
womenandtheholocaust.com

As seen in Schmoozenews.com

A Memoir Broken Birds, The Story of my Momila

Prison Guards, Yellow Stars, Ovens and Gestapo are the words of my youth.

In my Memoir Broken Birds, The Story of my Momila, I describe the story of my mother, a Partisan fighter in World War II, and my father, a survivor of Dachau death camp, and their five children. When Mom dies, she doesn't leave the family home to Dad, or distribute it evenly among the five children, but instead leaves it to a single child. What was once a close-knit family is now led down the road to emotional destruction.

My memoir begins with both my mother’s and father’s harrowing Holocaust stories, as their childhood experiences provide the crucial framework for everything that follows. It then goes on to describe how my parents met and started a family in the United States. It covers our move to Los Angeles and my own childhood, as well as those of my four siblings. The turning point in the story comes when my beloved mother dies. The final section of my story reveals how the choices she made in her will contributed to the fracturing of my family. The message is clear: the Holocaust casts a long shadow, and its destructive influence continues to ravage even the younger generations, who must cope with parents scarred by the horrors they endured as children and whose own ability to nurture and produce emotionally healthy children has been stunted. I feel strongly that this story will resonate with children of other survivors, of whom there are thousands across the United States and beyond.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center and the Washington Holocaust Museum’s both have copies in their archival libraries.

Michael Berenbaum, Director of American Jewish University says:

“Jeanette Katzir’s memoir describes, as few works have, the enduring legacy of the Holocaust to those who survived and those whom they brought into the world, raised and reared. In the last decades we overly optimistic Americans have preferred a narrative of triumph, of survivors overcoming the evil, enduring and making a compensating contribution that made us marvel; thus, showing us that any evil can be overcome, that suffering leaves no lasting impact. Would that were so. Katzir faithfully retells the story of her parents during the Shoah and then of life in Los Angeles when it was beginning to grow and blossom in the 1950s and 60s. But she traverses the dynamic of a family that was both drawn together by the residue of suffering and ultimately split apart. The book if alternately brave and bold, depressing, saddening and enraging but always engaging.”

Jeannette Katzir www.BrokenBirds.com