Michelle Friedman’s Divine Corners: In the Shadow of the Holocaust on a Catskills Chicken Farm is an engaging, emotionally moving, and often humorous read that delves into the unique childhood and family history of its author. Friedman was raised by Holocaust survivors on a chicken farm in Divine Corners, a remote hamlet in the Catskills town of Fallsburg. She graduated from Barnard College with a BA in religion and is now a practicing psychiatrist with training in psychoanalysis. In the book’s prologue, Friedman describes how this project stemmed from her desire to make sense of the intergenerational burdens that she and her siblings carried. She wanted to pinpoint the forces that cultivated her resilience but left her siblings with more enduring wounds. The result of this endeavor is a book that defies easy categorization; it is at once a personal memoir, a sociological dive into postwar Jewish life in the Borscht Belt, and a psychological study of the impacts of Holocaust trauma.
With an alternating timeline, Friedman weaves together her childhood experiences on the farm, family members’ stories, and pivotal moments in her adulthood. The narrative is anchored by the stories of Friedman’s parents, Arnold and Regina, who survived the Holocaust by living under Polish aliases. Although they never expected to run a chicken farm in the Catskills, a complicated family arrangement on Arnold’s side ultimately left them little choice. The farm became the backdrop of a childhood that was simultaneously idyllic and harrowing. Friedman recalls exciting outdoor adventures, the joy of summer visits from family and friends, and the creative ways she repurposed household items to craft props for her doll collection. She does not, however, shy away from detailing the brutal memories of her father’s abuse or the ways that other adults around her crossed boundaries and left deep scars. In narrating these coexisting realities, Friedman underscores the healing power of teasing out the positive elements that often underlie even the most painful of memories.
Additionally, Friedman explores the many layers of her Jewish identity. She was at once a farm girl with a thirst for outdoor adventure, the child of secular Holocaust survivors, and an inquisitive soul who yearned for answers to the big questions at the center of Judaism. She explains how her childhood curiosity about theology, peoplehood, and ritual, further bolstered by her academic study of religion in college led her into a robust, religiously observant life as an adult. In this way, Friedman’s book sheds light on the diverse paths that many Jewish people take towards cultivating their own religious practice and finding their place within a community.
Despite turbulent moments from the author’s childhood and the tragic impacts of familial estrangement, Divine Corners is primarily a story about the power of resilience, perspective, and forgiveness. It offers an account of how postwar American expectations and European sensibilities blended together in the lives of Holocaust survivors and their children. Friedman’s capacity to understand the impacts of her past, as well as her willingness to acknowledge the limits of memory and interpretation, encourages the reader to reflect on their own family legacies and the often unseen forces that shape relationships across generations.
