WINTER LIGHT

Feuerverger reflects on the emotional challenges of being raised by Holocaust survivors.

In 1942, the entire Jewish population of Częstochowa, Poland, was deported to various concentration camps in a roundup that included the author’s recently married parents. They were sent to a Nazi forced labor camp and narrowly survived until they were liberated by the Russian army; their family members were killed at Treblinka, however, including Feuerverger’s two maternal uncles. In 1948, the author’s parents escaped the relentless antisemitism they endured in Poland by moving to Montreal; Feuerverger grew up there, blessed with freedom and security but haunted by the trauma suffered by her parents. Her father was a man beset by “screaming nightmares,” and her mother was emotionally mercurial, capable of violent outbursts at any time. Still, the author tried to cultivate a love of life. “I seemed to be on the wrong side of everything. My strivings for the life force were a crime against the order of things, a crime against the cramped vision of my mother’s world. I challenged the tyranny that reigned supreme. How dare I want things when my mother’s whole family had been murdered?” Feuerverger’s search for a “place of inner solace” is profoundly inspiring—she found consolation in books, language, and culture and eventually became a professor of French and Italian. She would go on to marry Andrey, a man with a similar familial history, and the pair “would save each other’s lives.” With affecting clarity, the author meditates on the ways in which trauma is transmitted generationally. This is less a chronologically linear autobiography than a series of impressionistic essays, often rendered in poetically stirring prose. At this point, so much has been written on the Holocaust and its infinite ramifications that one can’t reasonably expect literary originality, and this book doesn’t offer it. Nonetheless, this is a powerful story, conveyed with deep humanity and insight.

A moving account of the Holocaust’s painful reach.