Helen Schary Motro’s The Right to Happiness: After All They Went Through is a beautifully, movingly written collection of short stories linked by its characters’ connection to the Holocaust. While that tragedy is ever-present in the background, these stories are filled with life. This book would be perfect to pick up following the formal commemorations of Holocaust Remembrance Day.
A writer and attorney who was a columnist for The Jerusalem Post, Motro has articles that have appeared in The New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, the Boston Globe, Haaretz, and Newsweek. She is also the author of the nonfiction book Maneuvering Between the Headlines.
Motro was clearly inspired by her experiences as the child of Holocaust survivors to create these stories. They are not told from a single point of view but rather shift between the survivors and their children, between Israel and New York, and between the recent past and the post-war period.
These shifts showcase the diversity of what Jews went through in the Holocaust and how the tragedy continues to cast its shadow on the present. What comes through is, as the title suggests, the survivors’ and their families’ will to live, and the creative ways they found to pick up the pieces.
If you’ve ever wondered how someone could carry on following that kind of trauma, these stories will give you a glimpse into the inner lives of those who were able to build new lives. At the same time, they do not neglect the price they paid.
The stories vividly brought to mind the survivors I knew growing up on New York’s Upper West Side, where a large percentage of the elderly had numbers tattooed on their arms.
The stories of Holocaust survivors and trauma
SEVERAL STORIES recount the lengths to which survivors’ children go in order to try to understand and identify with parents who keep their pasts secret. In the opening story, “The Smoker,” a young girl takes up smoking out of a desire to better understand her grandmother. When she gets caught by her mother’s oldest and closest friend, she is treated to a story from her mother’s and grandmother’s lives she never knew.
In “The Parade,” a girl manages with great difficulty to get her survivor mother to agree to take her to the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, a ritual that is a part of growing up for most New York City kids but involves a journey from Brooklyn that terrifies her mother, who fears the unknown.
Several stories take place in Israel, from very different perspectives. In “Korczak’s Children,” an educator manages to take a group of rowdy, at-risk teens from an Israeli youth village to Poland to see the death camps, long before such trips were common for Israeli teens, with predictably undignified results. In “German Lessons,” a lonely Israeli man, the son of German immigrants, finds that briefly studying at the Goethe Institute in Tel Aviv helps him find a community.
Another perspective on Israel comes through the eyes of the mother of a special-needs child who follows her husband to the Weizmann Institute in the especially moving story “Love of the Land,” where she finds that a kind-hearted taxi driver and citrus farmer, a survivor of the death camps, is the only one who reaches out to welcome her and her daughter.
Two stories, “My Musical Education” and “The Right to Happiness,” evoke the ways in which some kept the past alive in New York. In the first story, a mother thinks she is doing a favor to her daughter, who has no gift for music, by shuffling her among various dour prestigious Polish-Jewish émigré piano teachers, who represent the best of the old country.
In the book’s title story, a wealthy New York matron who fled Germany as a girl with her mother, while the rest of her family perished, suddenly finds herself identifying with what she sees as the low-class Jews of Israel while Israel’s existence hangs in the balance during a war. All of the status-seeking she clings to as she built her life in New York’s German-Jewish émigré community falls away as she embraces fellow Jews who had always seemed so alien to her.
The story that spoke to me the least was “Iron Eagle on West 11th Street,” an ambitious, fictionalized reimagining of the relationship between Hannah Arendt-Martin Heidegger, with characters clearly based on the real people. While the story is well written, Arendt’s bizarre decision after the war to forgive her philosophy mentor and lover – who became a Nazi sympathizer – has been discussed and dramatized enough already. Arendt’s choice was a puzzling, unpleasant coda to their twisted relationship, and I didn’t feel this story added much to my understanding of it.
This collection of stories was published by Amsterdam Publishers, a thriving international publishing house based in the Netherlands that focuses on Holocaust memoirs and literature. Its founder, Liesbeth Heenk, said in an interview last year, “The reservoir of true Holocaust stories continues to grow. I will consider my job to be unfinished until six million stories are told.”
The stories in this collection, full of sharply observed details and expertly conveyed emotions, will go a long way toward fulfilling this noble goal. While they are firmly grounded in the hearts and souls of the survivors and their families, these tales tell a universal story of love and loss that will appeal to any reader in search of a good story.
- THE RIGHT TO HAPPINESS AFTER ALL THEY WENT THROUGH
- By Helen Schary Motro
- Amsterdam Publishers
- 238 pages; $17
