In her mem­oir, Win­ter Light, Grace Feuerverg­er mov­ing­ly con­veys the emo­tion­al bur­dens and scars that she endured as the child of two Holo­caust sur­vivors. Her sto­ry is both heart-wrench­ing and inspir­ing as she writes about her jour­ney to move beyond the demons of her child­hood to the light she found through the study and teach­ing of lan­guage and culture. 

Grace Feuerverg­er was the sec­ond of three chil­dren born to Holo­caust sur­vivors. At the end of the Holo­caust, Feuerverger’s moth­er mirac­u­lous­ly gave birth to a son in 1945. A few years lat­er in 1948, the fam­i­ly of three emi­grat­ed to Mon­tre­al, Cana­da. Feuerverg­er was born sev­er­al years lat­er, fol­lowed by her sis­ter. From her ear­li­est mem­o­ries, Feuerverg­er recalls the trau­ma that lived with­in her par­ents brought on by the mur­der of near­ly all of their fam­i­ly and the unimag­in­able hor­rors they expe­ri­enced in a con­cen­tra­tion camp. They were haunt­ed by ghosts of their past. Feuerverg­er’ writes vivid­ly about the ghosts that began to haunt her, paint­ing an ago­niz­ing­ly painful pic­ture of a child inher­it­ing the trau­ma of her par­ents — par­ents who were too lost in their own trau­ma to pro­vide Feuerverg­er with the love and emo­tion­al sup­port she des­per­ate­ly need­ed. Instead, her trau­ma was com­pound­ed by a moth­er who seem­ing­ly took out her anger and sad­ness on Feuerverg­er. Every suc­cess Feuerverg­er expe­ri­enced was met with ridicule or anger from her mother. 

Her father, on the oth­er hand, pro­vid­ed Feuerverg­er with occa­sion­al glimpses of the man he was before the Holo­caust. Dur­ing one of these times, he intro­duced Feuerverg­er to the library and the world of books. Those books would become her sal­va­tion and path through the trau­ma into light. Her love of books flour­ished once she went to school, lead­ing to a love of lan­guage and cul­ture, where she ulti­mate­ly found a home as a pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Toron­to. Through prose that often reads like poet­ry, Feuerverg­er takes the read­er on a jour­ney through the peo­ple, places and expe­ri­ences that opened her up to a dif­fer­ent way of mov­ing past the trau­ma — one filled with life, love, and light. 

Feuerverger’s jour­ney towards heal­ing will res­onate deeply with oth­ers suf­fer­ing from gen­er­a­tional trau­ma. While the expe­ri­ences of those deal­ing with the Holocaust’s lega­cy are deeply per­son­al, her sto­ry pro­vides hope that out of the trau­ma, a place of inner solace can be found.