Reflections – Growing up Culturally Jewish in America
Born in New Jersey in April 1945, just 3 weeks before the end of war in Europe, Guy grew up in perhaps the greatest period of US prosperity and expanding worldwide influence.
Deeply influenced both by his first-generation extended family and their roots in 19th century Eastern Europe, and his fractured orthodox Hebrew education, Guy traces his growth in post-war America beginning with his Yiddish-speaking parents, to his motivation for learning German to his post-graduate study in Germany and later reckoning with the reality the Holocaust.
In Her Own Words: Eva Herzberg Schwartz, a German Jewish Refugee
Dr. Schwartz will share the story of her mother, Eva Herzberg Schwartz, who, in 1937 at the age of 16, fled Nazi Germany with her parents and settled in the Bay Area. Dr. Schwartz will focus on two detailed documents her mother left behind—an autobiography and a family tree going back to the 18th century, and her family’s life in Trier.
Growing Up in a Twice-Nuclear Holocaust-Refugee Family
My mother and father met as students at a physics lecture in Berlin Germany, pre-Hitler, though they only married in exile, on the sidelines of the US nuclear-bomb project. Most of my mother’s extended family was scattered to the far corners of the earth, but her own parents were murdered early in the Holocaust—a fact I learned as a very small child, right at the end of WWII. When my mother died in 1998, I came across letters in German written by her mother, in the late 1930s. The Gerlind Institute recently translated some for me—the first time I had any real sense of my grandmother’s own thoughts.