Parents are not supposed to have favorites, but in our family of five children, Mom and Dad did.
I don’t blame them because it wasn’t their fault. The Holocaust broke them.
In Broken Birds, The Story of My Momila, I delve into my family, the Poltzer Family, and what happened to the generation after Mom and Dad’s….the second generation.
Unaware of our chips and fractures, my four siblings and myself believed we ere a happy family. But the seeds of intense sibling rivalries planted when we were too young to remember were sprouting and flourishing just beneath the surface. We ended up lying, cheating, begrudging and emotionally harming each other, over and over again.
When Mom unexpectedly died, the biased and problematic will she wrote caused all hell to break loose.
It was a no holds-back slugfest. The battles raged in our attempt to resolve our new issues while the old scars were bubbling to the surface.
When the battles were over, I was able to see my family clearly.
In the end, the Holocaust not only broke Mom and Dad, but indirectly us too.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center and the Washington Holocaust Museum’s both have copies in their archival libraries.
Broken birds has happily already received two endorsement:
Michael Berenbaum, Director
American Jewish University.
“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 dynamics 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.”
And
Vikki Stark, author of My Sister – My Self:
“Broken Birds”, Jeannette Katzir’s vibrant family history poignantly captures the hurt and yearning that so often marks the bond between brothers and sisters whose parents were “broken” by war. We are drawn into the drama of the five Poltzers as they struggle to find the glue to keep the family connected despite powerful forces that rip them apart. If you have a brother or sister, you’ll nod knowingly as you recognize yourself in Katzir’s true and compelling picture of the complex web of sibling relationships.”
Jeannette Katzir
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