Reflections – Growing up Culturally Jewish in America

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.

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Growing Up in a Twice-Nuclear Holocaust-Refugee Family
Holocaust, Jewish J B Holocaust, Jewish J B

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.

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