PEOPLE OF THE BOOKS


PTSD also affected survivors of the Shoah

The First and Final Nightmare of Sonia Reich, by Howard Reich.Public Affairs, New York, 2006, 190pp. $25

By David Strom

SAN DIEGO— “’Mom went running out of the house tonight,’ my sister said.  ‘Running on the streets, and the police picked her up and brought her to Aunt Sarah’s house.’”
         
What?
         
“The police got her and she’s safe now.  What are we going to do?”
         
This took place on February 15, 2001.  Why?
         
Her childhood ended abruptly. Her peaceful life, often portrayed by Sonia Reich as idyllic, came crashing down and shattered when the Soviet Army entered her hometown of Dubno, Poland in 1939.  Sonia’s grandfather, one of the richest businessmen in the area, had his home occupied by the Soviet Army leadership. They assigned one room at the back of the house for Sonia’s extended family-grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles, and cousins.  Her grandfather’s livelihood, and all the income of family members who worked at the family trade, was taken away as the Soviets nationalized her grandfather’s and all other businesses.
         
Never recovering from the shock of losing his life’s work, her grandfather died in 1940. The rest of the family and Sonia  adjusted to the new austere and rigid life under Communist rule.  She attended, along with her cousins, Sovietized schools. She witnessed the closing of shuls and harassment of religious Jews.  She and her relatives were not singled out because they were   Jews, but suffered the same fate as their gentile neighbors. This changed when the Nazis broke their non-aggression agreement with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in June 1941 and seized the rest of Poland.
         
Life under the Soviets was bearable.  Under the Nazis, life for Jews of Dubno became horrible. Roundups were common.  Beatings and killing of Jews routine.  All Jews were forced to wear a yellow star.  If they did not and it was discovered, they could be shot on the spot. Sonia witnessed all of this. A Nazi officer placed a gun to her forehead and threatened to kill her.  From that moment on, she determined that to survive she must escape the ghetto.          
         
She did.  From 1942 until the end of the war, Sonia survived by running.  She hid from most Ukrainians and Poles. Occasionally she slept in homes where people risked their own safety by hiding a Jew. To survive, she lost her Jewish identity. A righteous gentile gave her baptismal papers and a new Catholic name.  She learned to pray as a Catholic.  Learned to speak like a peasant.  Everything she did was predicated on surviving. 
         
She survived.  Her parents did not.  The Nazis and their willing helpers murdered all her aunts and uncles.  Almost all her cousins were gassed in death camps.  At the end of the war, she was alone, just as she had been during her years of hiding from the brutish Nazis.
         
After the war, she came to the United States.  She worked to support herself and eventually married.  Her husband was a  survivor too.  They settled in Chicago and opened their own bakery in “Germantown.”  It seemed ironic to Sonia and her husband that most of their customers were German or of Germen descent.  Their knowledge of the German language was a “gift” of the hated Nazis.  They were “force fed” the language which helped them  survive. Now they spoke German with their customers to survive in business.  They never told their clients they were Jews.
         
Once their business closed, the Reich family moved to Skokie, Illinois-where thousands of holocaust survivors lived.  It was here that the author of The First and Final Nightmare of Sonia Reich, Howard Reich, grew up.  He lived now among many Jewish people, learned about his Jewish heritage and eventually had a bar mitzvah. However, he had scant knowledge of the holocaust nor how his parents survived it. Why?
         
Many who survived the holocaust were greeted by the American Jewish world with a great deal of indifference.  The American Jews wanted survivors to “fit” quickly into the American way of life, just as their parents had. Also, the survivors wanted to forget the past horrors as rapidly as it was humanly possible.  Those two ideas meshed into “don’t tell and don’t talk” about the past.  Only the present and the future was important.
         
Like many holocaust survivors, Sonia and her husband didn’t discuss their childhood, and didn’t talk about the destruction of their family and lives.  They wanted and needed to forget.  They wanted their children to have what was stolen from them--a stable and happy home life. For the most part, they accomplished that goal.  But the survivors paid a high price for that worthy goal-family happiness and solidarity.
         
Many children of holocaust survivors knew little about the Shoah.  Often they knew even less about their parents ordeals. Thus they were ill equipped for a time when their parents, who were now older and physically and mentally weakened, might break down.  They had to rely on the scant knowledge of the professional world when it came to certain types of mental breakdowns. What did the psychological profession know about holocaust victims and their need for psychological intervention?
         
Howard Reich, author of this fascinating book about his mother’s life during the holocaust, knew nothing about his mother’s mental welfare in February of 2001. He learned too many professionals in the health field knew very little about what was happening with Sonia.  They were unable to “connect the dots” as to why she ran down the street thinking someone wanted to put a bullet in her head. Howard Reich, to his credit, refused to give up.  He traveled to many places in Europe, spoke with his mother’s cousin, who had also survived the holocaust, and toured the city where his mother grew up. He learned how his mother’s past related to the present.  Howard Reich now understood how the Post Traumatic Syndrome Disorder played an important role in his mother’s battle with sanity.  He knew now the haunted past is never past. If his mother dealt with it earlier in her life, it could possibly be meaningfully dealt with now.
         
The phrase “Never Forget” becomes, for Sophie, a living curse.

Strom is a professor of education at San Diego State University




THE JEWISH CITIZEN

The Jewish Americans: 3-part PBS series offers 'history commenting on history'

By Donald H. Harrison

SAN DIEGO—The second episode of the three-part The Jewish Americans, airing at 9 p.m. Wednesday night on the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) network, should. please, be as good as the first episode, which screened last week. That was like watching history comment on history.

Some of the commentators were people who have been and may yet be the subjects of learned biographies, among them: U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginzburg; University of Pennsylvania President Amy Gutmann; Tony Award-winning director Tony Kushner; advice columnist Pauline Esther Friedman Phillips (Dear Abby); actor Fyvush Finkel; comedian Carl Reiner; Home Depot chairman Bernie Marcus; and conductor Michael Tilson Thomas.

Other commentators, as is typical in a documentary, were historians and journalists. For San Diego viewers of KPBS, I was asked in a local segment airing immediately prior to each episode of the national series to tell stories about San Diego's early Jewish history, including such subjects as the city's first temple (Beth Israel); our first Jewish settler (Louis Rose), and the so-called 'San Diego Incident' in which High Holiday services were disrupted by a Grand Jury proceeding.

The first segment of the national program covered a lot of ground, starting with the arrival in Nieuw Amsterdam in 1654 of 23 Jewish refugees from Brazil, a colony which had been wrested from the Dutch by the Portuguese. As the Portuguese still were practicing the Inquisition, the Jews decided life might be better for them farther north. How right they were, despite initial resistance from the Dutch governor of Nieuw Amsterdam, Peter Stuyvesant, who wanted to deny them residence in the colony. His superiors in the Netherlands overruled him, however, saying Jewish settlement might help the New World economy.

Subsequent Jewish immigrants to the United States found a place, according to Guttman, where Jews were as free as any time in their history, a place of unparalleled opportunity. "What is the difference between a bookkeeper in New York's garment district and a Supreme Court justice?" Ruth Bader Ginzburg asked with a smile. "One generation!" Among the guarantors of such Jewish freedom, the Supreme Court justice added, was the adoption of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution which enabled all people to worship in their own way, and which forbade the establishment of an official religion.

Jews had felt the need to be cautious in colonial America. The famous Touro Synagogue in Newport Beach was plain, almost unidentifiable as a synagogue externally, yet elaborate and Judaically rich internally, mirroring the concept that Jews in America should be like everyone else on the outside, keeping their faith on the inside. Later in American history, Jews felt more secure, building grand synagogues with clearly visible Jewish symbols on the outside.

With the freedom to excel denied to Jews elsewhere around the world, American Jewry faced another challenge: rapid assimilation. Could immigrants become Americans, yet retain their Jewishness? Many could not. Abigaill Franks, from a prominent colonial family, disowned her daughter for marrying a Gentile, but such sterness could not stem the tide. Not one of her great-grandchildren was born a Jew.

At the time of the Declaration of Independence in 1776 there were perhaps 2,500 Jew in an American population of 2.5 million, among them Haym Salomon who helped raise money for the Continental Army. In the early 19th century, many Jews immigrated from Germany and surrounding central European countries. Some of them followed the same trade they had in Europe: that of peddling. Successful peddlars graduated from a back pack, to a cart, to a wagon, to a store. Extremely successful peddlars became founders of major businesses including the Lehman Brothers, Levi Strauss, Meyer Guggenheim and the Spiegel family.

The documentary lingered on the Spiegels, first following the career of Marcus Spiegel, who served as a colonel in the Union Army during the Civil War, and juxtaposing it with the career of Judah Benjamin, a U.S. senator from Louisiana who became secretary of state in the Confederacy. Spiegel died in a Civil War battle; Benjamin survived the defeat of the Confederacy and emigrated to England, where he finished his life as a successful barrister. The point: Jews, like Gentiles, were found on both sides ofthe Civil War. Approximately seven thousand Jews fought for the union; three thousand for the Confederacy. Marcus Speigel has a brother, Joseph, who opened a store, and then hit upon the idea of publishing a catalogue that could by mail peddle goods to homes across America. The Spiegel Catalogue became enormously successful.

Moving to the post-Civil War period, the documentary told of Anna Solomon, who with her husband built a store in Pubelo Vieja, Arizona, and turned it into a trading center for travelers heading west on stagecoach. Eventually, the town was renamed in her honor "Solomonville." A strong Jewish woman, she made certain that everyone of her children married into the Jewish faith.

Others profiled from the post Civil War period included Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, who launched the Reform movement in the United States; and Joseph Seligmann, a merchant turned banker who became a friend and confidante to U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant, but who nevertheless was turned away from the Grand Union Hotel in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., which decided it no longer wished to accept Jews as guests. The snub of Seligmann marked a turning point in the American Jewish saga: it brought to public light the nativist resistance to them and to other immigrants from Europe.

After the 1881 pogrom in Russia, many Eastern European Jews headed for opportunity in the United States. They tended to concentrate in the cities, especially in the Lower East Side of New York, where a vibrant Jewish cultural life developed, notwithstanding the squalor of the tenements in which many of them lived. Kushner, Fybush, Dear Abby, and Thomas (grandson of the actor Boris Thomashevsky) elaborated upon an era in which the Yiddish theatre flourished and the Daily Forward became one of the most widely read newspapers in the country. 'Dear Abby' delivered the exquisite compliment that while she was just an advice columnist, the Forward's editor Abraham Cahan, who answered immigrants' questions about adapting to life in the new world, had been both a columnist and a "poet."

The Lower East Side was also home to many sweatshops, none more infamous than the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, at which a fire claimed the lives of 146 workers, of which 123 were women. The justifiable outrage over the conditions that had led to the fire and which had prevented many of the workers from escaping, helped to fuel the American labor movement. I was surprised that the series here did not mention Samuel Gompers, the Jewish leader of the American Federation of Labor, but, of course, no television series can include everything. There was so much good that was in it; I don't feel justified in complaining over the fact that there wasn't even more.

Other products of the Lower East Side were crime, in the form of the Jewish Mafia, which cooperated and at times was integrated with the Italian Mafia, and, on the other end of the social spectrum, wonderful programs in philanthropy, such as Lillian Wald's visiting nurses program (funded by Jacob Schiff) which expanded into the still-active settlement house program.

While the German Jews who came to America most often affiliated with the Reform movement, many Eastern European Jews, at least initially, sought more familiar worship patterns. Some Orthodox Jews were afraid to migrate to America, which they saw as a Godless country. But others, including the followers of the Belzer rebbe, believed, as Rabbi Saul Berman put it "the same God is there" in America. Some observant Jews who would not work on Shabbat repeated a pattern of taking a job on Sunday and getting fired on Friday.

After the first generation settled on the Lower East Side, their children were ready to move on to the larger America, where they found they were not always welcome. Part II of the series, this coming Wednesday night, will deal with what happened next. The segement is titled "The Best of Times, The Worst of Times."

Harrison is editor and publisher of San Diego Jewish World

ROBINSON-ROSE HOUSE—Today used as the Visitors Center for Old Town San Diego State Historic Park, this building was home to James W. Robinson, a former provisional governor of Texas, and later Louis Rose, San Diego's first Jewish settler

A ride into San Diego Jewish history

By Gaby Maio

SAN DIEGO—Old Town San Diego offers a wide variety of sights.  There are families walking around, gift and coffee shops, historical houses, and Old Town Trolley Tours.  On a recent weekday, my mother and I ventured to this unique area of San Diego and signed up for a trolley tour.  After getting our tickets and a map, we waited for the every-half-hour trolley to arrive.  We chose a seat midway down the aisle of the orange and green trolley, and soon learned that by happenstance we weren’t sitting on just any trolley. This one was named after the first Jewish settler in San Diego, Louis Rose, who had made an immense difference in San Diego. 

Gaby Maio
After completing the two-hour tour around San Diego and Coronado, my mother and I went to look at the Robinson-Rose House in Old Town to learn the history behind it all.  Rose had lived in the home after purchasing it from the widow of his close friend, James W. Robinson.

We learned that Louis Rose was born in Germany in 1807 and traveled to San Diego in 1850.  In his mere first five years of living in San Diego, Rose had accomplished an immense amount.  He was a member of the first grand jury and first county Board of Supervisors as well as president of the Board of Trustees for San Diego.  He also served on the San Diego School Board and on the first County Board of Supervisors

Yet his civic duty to our city did not stop there.  Louis Rose was concerned with San Diego’s future and wanted to build a city on the bay that would be somewhat of a downtown.  He called his city Roseville, and it is today located in what is known as the Loma Portal and Point Loma areas of San Diego.  There he built a wharf and wanted to link Roseville to other towns with a railroad.  Many were extremely skeptical about his project and his future visions, yet he kept to them and Roseville eventually became part of San Diego.

Rose also owned a hotel, saloon, and a butcher shop in Old Town.  He never gave up on San Diego and did
The Louis Rose with Old Town Trolley
cast member David Cheney driving awaits
a charter group.

his best to make sure that the growth of San Diego would be a success.  Many had doubted the future of the city, but Rose would simply reply, “Just wait awhile and you will see.”  He jumpstarted San Diego to what it is today.  As the first Jew in San Diego, he helped create a future for all of us.  To this day, he still is recognized for his leadership to this city.

The year 2004 marked the 350th anniversary of Jewish settlement in North America.  San Diego decided to commemorate and recognize Louis Rose for his impact by naming a spot near Roseville as “Louis Rose Point.”  Today you can still venture down into Old Town and find his home and the town that he helped to grow.  The trolley tour that my mother and I went on was created to show the history of San Diego—a city which the trolley’s namesake had helped to build.

Walking through Old Town , you can feel the sense of history.  My mother and I ventured down the streets taking pictures of all the Old Town sights. What caught our eye, however, was the impact that Louis Rose had made on that area and San Diego generally.  With a goal to never give up, and a dream to create a city like the one we have today, Louis Rose was a major leader in San Diego County.  All it takes is a walk through Old Town to indulge yourself in the vision of one man.

Maio is a student at San Diego Jewish Academy

FORSAKING 'CIVILIZATION'—Emile Hirsch portrays Christopher McCandless who gave up his affluent lifestyle to live on the edge of civilization in Into the Wild

AT THE MOVIES

Into the Wild: a movie that delivers its title

By Alexa Katz

SAN DIEGO—When adventure, great acting, and an amazing story unite into one feature film chances are its going to turn into an amazing movie. Into the Wild, directed by Sean Penn and starring Emile Hirsch is this movie.

The film is the true life story of Christopher McCandless (Emile Hirsch) who adopted the pseudonym Alexander Supertramp when he decided to leave the material world and enter the natural one. His desire to rid everything material from his affluent life came from reading Henry David
Alexa Katz
Thoreau’s Walden, or, Life in the Woods and Boris Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago, as well as from his studies at Emory about events like the African apartheid.

In addition, the instability in the relationship  between his mother, Billie McCandless (Marcia Gay Harden) and his father, Walt McCandless, (William Hunt) and some other unsettling information prompted him to rebel against materialism.

Based on a book by Jon Krakauer,  the movie is narrated by McCandless’s sister, Carine, (Jena Malone) and it follows his cross country trip which finally ends in an abandoned bus in the Alaskan wilderness. This trip is separated into chapters based on Christopher’s diary of his journey. Somehow  he managed to better the lives of everyone he came in contact with. The most meaningful of these encounters was with Jan Burres (Catherine Keener) and Ron Franz (Hal Holbrook).

Despite the wanderer’s own happiness and the happiness he brought to the people he came in contact with, the despair his family experienced from his sudden disappearance makes you wonder if the protagonist of the story is really the antagonist.

The movie’s soundtrack by Eddie Vedder, of the band Pearl Jam, along with its’ beautiful backcountry scenery, especially of Alaska, perfectly highlight the beautiful, but ultimately troubled words that McCandless wrote in his diary. The way the camera work is done mirrors this, so you see both the good and the bad of the wild that McCandless loves so much. At times, you feel like you’re hitchhiking, laughing, and even starving right beside him.

All of the acting in this movie is superb and it has an all star cast, but Emile Hirschs’ performance is one of the best I have seen. It is so incredible that from the time the movie starts you don’t believe that you are watching Emile Hirsch, but really believe that this is Christopher McCandless. This sentiment is proven at the very end of the movie when a picture is shown of the real Christopher McCandless. Perhaps this incredible acting was the result of Academy Award winner Sean Penn being both the director and screenwriter of this true story which was based on a book by Jon Krakauer.

Despite my high recommendations for this movie, it is not for the faint of heart. There are many mature themes, violence, nudity, and a scene with a dead moose which made me want to gag. It is rated R for good reason, but it is can still be extremely meaningful to anyone of high school age or above.

Katz, a student at San Diego Jewish Academy, is editor-in-chief of the SDJA Student Quarterly