I recently attended my friend’s father’s memorial. It was held at the Faculty House of Columbia University in a perfectly lovely nondescript room with a bar. An elegant man with an appealingly mysterious accent led the service. I imagined he’d been a student of my friend’s father, who was a playwright and professor, or perhaps he worked for the University in some capacity. As the memorial unfolded, three things immediately came to mind: the deceased was roughly the age of the two protagonists in my new novel, A Dual Inheritance; like my protagonists, he’d gone to Harvard, and—though I knew my friend’s father was Jewish—there was no reference to it here. It was an entirely secular experience.

I thought of how my mother always says that there’s something cold and empty when an official service has no religious framework, and as so many friends and family paid loving and witty tribute to this obviously talented, stubborn, erudite, caring man, I carried on a mental argument with my mother, whose Judaism is expressed differently—more politically, more conservatively, less fraught—than mine is. I argued in my head for secularism. Here was a great example, I reasoned; here was a deep tribute without being defined by a religion into which my friend’s father happened to be born. He’d been orphaned fairly young, had a massive heart attack as a young man, had never thought he’d live past forty. He’d also been widowed young and had raised a daughter—my friend—who was now happily living in Berlin, raising a German-speaking son with a non-Jewish husband. You see, I told my mother in my silent protest, life can be so much bigger than religion.

At the end of the evening, after many remembrances, the man who’d led the service stood. He introduced himself as not only a friend of the deceased, but his rabbi. Though my friend’s father hadn’t led a religious life, he’d evidently been interested—especially toward the end—in questions of faith. The rabbi then introduced the deceased’s friend from Harvard, a man as not-Jewish as one can possibly be, an opera singer who stated it was his friend’s request that he sing this particular song, a song he imagined his dear friend enjoyed assigning because it was one that the opera singer didn’t know. I think he also knew how much I’d enjoy learning it, he said.

Then he sang.

It was the Mourner’s Kaddish.

And—despite all of those (deeply held!) mental arguments with my mother—that’s when I finally started to cry.

Read more about Joanna Hershon here.

“The schools would fail through their silence, the Church through its forgiveness, and the home through the denial and silence of the parents. The new generation has to hear what the older generation refuses to tell it.”  ― Simon Wiesenthal

“It is obvious that the war which Hitler and his accomplices waged was a war not only against Jewish men, women, and children, but also against Jewish religion, Jewish culture, Jewish tradition, therefore Jewish memory.” ― Elie Wiesel, Night

Like most Jewish children born in the fifties, the Holocaust was a constant shadow. If the German generation born after WWII suffered from collective guilt, trying to cast off the shame of their parents and grandparents, or convince themselves or the world of the innocence of their parents and grandparents, the generation of Jewish children born of the same time, suffered from collective fear.

I didn’t grow up in a traditional Jewish family (if such a thing exists) by any stretch of the imagination. The first time I entered a synagogue was for a friend’s Bar Mitzvah. But I read voraciously, and from the time I received my ‘adult’ card at the Brooklyn Public Library, I was reading accounts—fiction and nonfiction—of the Holocaust. The non-fairy tales of my youth were The Diary of Anne Frank, Mila 18, and Night (which then morphed to Jubilee and Roots, as I conflated the horrors of slavery and concentration camps into one mass of fright).

I grew up with a sense of doom—partly from these stories I consumed, partly due to my own family’s silence (my paternal great-grandparents emigrated from Germany, but I never knew why) and perhaps partially the hours spent looking at photos my father sent my mother from his post in Africa during WWII. That vast wasteland of desert merged in my mind with the nuclear wasteland I envisioned thanks to those elementary school drills spent under my classroom desk—the desks meant to shield us come the nuclear attack.

I never knew whether it was more likely I’d end up a survivor of a bomb, cowering under a desk, or sleeping on a wooden plank in an Auschwitz-like camp. Sophie’s Choice haunted me after my daughters were born. When I received an engagement ring, my crazy first and unbidden thought was that I could sew it into the lining of my coat if I needed to bribe a guard or save a child.

Should I compare my fear to the collective guilt of generations growing up on the other side, German children never wanting to question their parents or grandparents about their past? Can my inherited fear help me understand why the author of the essay, a woman whose parents and grandparents were in Germany during the war and post-war period, wanted to believe that the menorah on display at a SS officer’s house was likely to be a gift from a grateful patient as it was to be the spoils of war?

There has been a spate (or perhaps it’s always been there and I am just noticing it now) of novels about the trials of ordinary German citizens during the war. Many claim—a belief that seems most comfortable for many to live with—that the ordinary German had no clue what was happening. The entire Holocaust was carried about by a small slice of the population. Could this near-impossible-to-believe-assertion be possible? Or is it true, as reported in Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany:

Does this matter? Do we need to pound on the question of whether or not men and women in WWII Germany did or did not know about the horror unfolding around them? Does it matter whether or not this dying-out generation of SS officers and soldiers knew what they were doing? That their wives and neighbors knew there was a culture of genocide during these years?

For me, yes.

I believe lying and denial increases future racial and cultural terrors. Slavery bred concentrations camps, which bred Rwanda, which today breeds . . .

I want to know the plight of the ordinary German citizen—but I want to know it as it truly was—including deprivation and horror, but not painting away knowledge. I want to know how blind eyes were crafted—so these blindfolds can never be made again. I want to know more about the painful heritage of the children and grandchildren of the people of Germany who did know what was going on.

Gluckel of Hameln was an intrepid businesswoman, a mother of twelve children, a passionate wife, and a memoirist. She died in 1724, at the age of seventy-eight. Her memoirs are a rare window into the life of European Jewish women of the period. What struck me most vividly by her account of her days was her ability to bridge a business career (otherwise known as financial survival) and family concerns, living a unified, if exhausting, life.

“My father had me betrothed when I was a girl of barely twelve, and less than two years later I married.” So ends Gluckel’s childhood. As often happened, Gluckel’s marital deal included her being exported to another town. In this case, she was crammed into a peasant cart along with the rest of the wedding party (her mother was much put out, having expected carriages) and bustled off to the “dull and shabby hole” of Hameln, a small village. “There I was, a carefree child whisked in the flush of youth from my parents, friends, and everyone I knew, from a city like Hamburg into a back-country town where lived only two Jews.” After the wedding festivities were over, however, Gluckel adapted fast. She adored her father-in-law. After a year, however, her young husband’s ambitions were too big for Hameln and the married children moved to Hamburg, living with Gluckel’s family, where her father’s “pack of servants” helped them with daily life. There, as it was the fashion among gentiles to “wear solid gold chains, and gifts were all in gold”, her teenaged husband traded in gold, “plying his trade from house to house, to buy up the precious metal. Then he turned it over to goldsmiths, or resold it to merchants about to be married; and he earned thereby a tidy profit.” In addition to these efforts, Gluckel calls her husband “the perfect pattern of the pious Jew”; he set aside fixed times to study Torah each day, and fasted Mondays and Thursdays, to such an extent that he compromised his health. He was a tower of patience. In its maturity, their relationship was both harmonious and, in its way, egalitarian. Referring to the fact that her husband asked her advice about a business decision, Gluckel effuses, “my husband did nothing without my knowledge.”

By the time she was fifteen, Gluckel was pregnant, “and my mother along with me.” Coincidentally, both mother and daughter delivered within a week of each other. They both had girls, “so there was neither envy nor reproach between us.” Endless visitors arrived in the household, anxious to see “the marvel, a mother and daughter together in child bed.” But the situation could prove confusing. One night, Gluckel’s mother picked up the wrong baby to suckle, causing great alarm when Gluckel woke up and found her baby’s cradle empty. All was well in the end, but not after a furious argument as to whose baby was whose. “A little more, and we’d had to summon the blessed King Solomon himself.”

After a year, Gluckel’s little family struck out on their own, renting a house and engaging “a manservant and a maid.” The manservant, Abraham, looked after the children. So, the concept of a ‘manny’ is in fact not new. Abraham, Gluckel notes proudly, went on to marry and become a successful businessman “worth 10,000 Reichthalers or more”; within the Jewish community, servitude was not a class-dictated condition. One made one’s own circumstances to a large degree. Those with less worked for those who had more, until the servants changed their circumstances, at which point the lucky or industrious ones became employers.

It was in Gluckel’s life time that the false Messiah, Sabbatai Zevi, achieved enormous fame. Thousands of Jews, among them her father-in-law, became convinced that Zevi was in fact the messiah. Throughout the world Jewish families rent themselves with repentance, prayer, and charity. Gluckel’s father-in-law packed chests with dried meat and dates for the trip to the holy land, and waited for the call to join the Messiah. But Sabbatai Zevi, who may have been suffering from delusions, or was possibly just a charlatan, was arrested in Turkey and converted to Islam. It was in part the collective depressive void that followed his unmasking which made space for the Hasidim, and their radical message of joyful worship.

At the age of fourty-four, Gluckel’s faith was tested on her beloved’s death bed. As her man lay dying, Gluckel, who was having her menses and hence was forbidden to touch her husband, asked transgressively, “Dearest heart, shall I embrace you—I am unclean?” but he answered: “God forbid, my child—it will not be long before you take your cleansing (ritual bath that Orthodox women take after menstruation and childbirth).” He died later that day and so she never got to kiss him one last time. The massive struggle of self control she went through in those final moments must have been a torment.

Once widowed, Gluckel redoubled her efforts at business, trading in gems, lending money, travelling frequently. She amassed a tidy fortune and managed to marry off all her children, but then remarried a man with no business sense who lost her money. She ended up in the home of one of her daughters. Yet there is no trace of bitterness in Gluckel’s memoirs. She is, rather, a joyful, enterprising survivor, filled to the brim with life—even now, three hundred years after her death, her life force burns from the page.

Read more about Jacob's Folly and Rebecca Miller here.

May is National Jewish American Heritage Month, a whole month dedicated to celebrating and raising awareness for the cultural and societal impact of Jews in America.

If you’re looking to catch up on Jewish American history this month, you are in luck. We’ve put together here a handy list of titles for you to check out full of biographies and books about Jews in American pop culture.

You’ll find several biographies of culturally significant Jewish Americans, such as actor/filmmaker Woody Allen, composer George Gershwin, playwright David Mamet and singer Leonard Cohen and other books about the sociology of Seinfeld, the history of American Yiddish theater and Jews in the music industry.

You can also take advantage of Open Road Media’s current sale on ebooks, curated specifically for Jewish American Heritage Month. The sale will continue until May 15th and features fifty ebooks written by Jewish American authors in the genres of Jewish fiction, culture and philosophy.

“I’ve dictated a sharp article against the Jews,” Joseph Goebbels boasted in a journal entry in 1933. “At its mere announcement, the whole mischpoke [sic] broke down.”

The word used by the notorious propaganda chief of the Nazi party is a mangled version of the Yiddish word for ‘family’ (mishpocheh), and it conveys the cruelty and contempt that the Nazis held for the Jewish people. To hear the mamaloshen fall from the lips of a man who seeks to murder every Jewish man, woman, child and baby within his reach carries a special kind of horror.

I quote the journal entry in my new book, The Short, Strange Life of Herschel Grynszpan: A Boy Avenger, a Nazi Diplomat and a Murder in Paris (Liveright), and I use “mishpocheh’ as a kind of leitmotif in the story I tell. At the age of 15, Herschel was sent out of Nazi Germany by his doting mother and father, and the boy was passed along from uncle to uncle until he finally reached Paris, where he was given a place to live by his Uncle Abraham. They were all tragically wrong in assuming that France offered a safe refuge for the Grynszpans, but they acted loyally and courageously in an effort to save the life of the youngest member of the family.

While living in Paris, Herschel learned that his mother, father and older siblings back in Germany had been arrested by the Nazis and driven at gunpoint into the no-man’s-land on the Polish border along with some 12,000 other Polish Jews. Herschel was so distraught over the fate of his cherished family that he bought a revolver, contrived a ruse that allowed him to enter the German embassy in Paris, and assassinated a minor German diplomat as an act of protest and resistance. Ironically, Herschel and the uncle who sheltered him in Paris did not survive, but his father and brother were still alive to testify at Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem in 1961.

As it happens, I first heard the story of Herschel Grynszpan from one of my own mishpocheh — my late father, Robert Reuven Kirsch. He was a literary critic for the Los Angeles Times for nearly thirty years and the author of many books of his own, and he told me in the late 1970s about the novel he intended to write about Herschel’s life and exploits. Sadly, my father fell ill and passed away before he could undertake the project, but I never forgot the strange and even scandalous details of Herschel’s life story. I decided to honor the memory of my beloved father by writing the book that he did not live long enough to write.

That’s why the word mishpocheh appears for the first time in my biography of Herschel Grynszpan on the dedication page: “For my father, Robert . . . and the mishpocheh for whom [his] memory is a blessing.”

Jonathan Kirsch is author of 13 books, book editor of The Jewish Journal, and an intellectual property attorney in Los Angeles.

Bonus Reading: Check out National Jewish Book Award Winner Daniel Torday's story about Herschel Grynszpan for Five Chapters, in which he imagines Herschel was still alive, living in Brooklyn, and owned a record store.