Praise for Inheriting the Holocaust:

"Paula Fass's moving memoir is written with quiet dignity and the most impressive moral lucidity. Her account of a family devastated by genocide is testimony both to human resilience and to the painful price of emotional fragility paid in the midst of the resilience."-Robert Alter, University of California, Berkeley 

"Paula Fass combines her skills as an historian, writer, and researcher with her position as a child of survivors with memories imparted by her parents to create an unusual memoir of being part of the “second generation.” Her exceptional skills as a writer make this book more than the usual random memoir of information. The result is a touching family story supported by historical fact."-Jewish Book World, Fall 2009

Description:

In Inheriting the Holocaust, Paula S. Fass explores her own past as the daughter of Holocaust survivors to reflect on the nature of history and memory. Through her parents' experiences and the stories they recounted, Fass defined her engagement as a historian and used these skills to better understand her parents' lives.

Fass begins her journey through time and relationships when she travels to Poland and locates birth certificates of the murdered siblings she never knew. That journey to recover her family's story provides her with ever more evidence for the perplexing reliability of memory and its winding path toward historical reconstruction. In the end, Fass recovers parts of her family's history only to discover that Poland is rapidly re-imagining the role Jews played in the nation's past.

Paula S. Fass is Margaret Byrne Professor of History at the University of California at Berkeley, and has authored many books and articles, most recently Children of a New World: Society, Culture, and Globalization. She also edited the Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood in History and Society, which was named an outstanding reference source by the American Library Association.