Reviews of Sonia Pilcer's "The Holocaust Kid"

Reviews

Reviewed by Dana Adler Rosen
South Eastern Virginia Review

The title is deceiving so don't dismiss it as just another Holocaust book. Instead it is the witty, clever, sexy introspective work of a "2G- Second generation" or child of a Holocaust survivor. As a matter of fact this gem features terrific writing.

Fiction character Zosha was born after the war in a displaced persons camp with startling blue eyes. Even the Germans compare her blue eyes to those of the American movie star, Elizabeth Taylor. They mark her later destiny when her parents move to New York City. It is that comparison that leads her to write for a tabloid making up fiction about the rich and famous, like Elizabeth Taylor. It sounds off the wall but is really compelling. She balances her modern, single life with the demands of her mother, a Holocaust survivor.

Zosha is the guilt- ridden child of survivors. She lives with the collective memory constantly, while working at her desk fabricating yet another tabloid article, writing poetry into her private journal, driving, or sleeping. She says that she has absorbed the Holocaust experience by osmosis. Funny and sad, this book deftly handles the issues faced by children of survivors. She exquisitely jumps through time going from pre-war memories of her mother who was saved by her white scarf and pulled from the crowd destined for death the displacement camp where she was born and fawned over, her work at the movie start tabloid, her childhood, and her mother's childhood.

Zosha sometimes feels guilty that she writes for the tabloids but redeems herself by writing about her parent's experiences. "Did we survive the war for this? Sleaze? You think you're a real writer? Schlockmeister. Try standing in the freezing snow for two hours without shoes." Then she consoles herself. "What I wanted, why I yearned to be a writer was to tell stories. My parents' stories, which were mine too. Slowly I slid open my desk drawer, pulling out a manila folder. I had printed one word on the cover. SURVIVORS"

The relationship between Zosha and her mother is complex. It is full of the tug and rebellion between an unmarried daughter and a concerned mother. Zosha finds her mother suffocating but her mother only wants her to find happiness, marry, and have children. She naturally rebels through the various men in her life. Her own father is as silent and reserved as her mother is vocal and domineering

Zosha is fierce and unflinching at times. In her quest, she meets and is seduced by a cocky Holocaust professor. His inscription to her in his book reads "Welcome to the Club" She storms out. "I slammed the book shut and returned it to him. "Not me," I said shaking my head. "Not my club. This was just temporary insanity." "No matter what you do, you're stuck with the Holocaust. So is the rest of the world. But you, Zosha, have a special task," he said. "Is this supposed to be some sort of lesson for the Holocaust Professor?" "You're a smart kid." He patted me on the ass. "You know those files of yours--" He raised those hairy brows of his. "Write something." I met his stare. "What makes you think I haven't?"

Her mother, who lets herself into Zoe's apartment unannounced rifles through her desk and finds a manuscript. She sits on the bed and reads it. Zoe's manuscript began:

"We came to America. I forgot my polish. I was an America girl with no accent. I had friends, my own life, which I longed to grow into like a pair of oversize shoes. When I left home, I intended to create a self that had nothing to do with my parents' past. But I wanted to be a writer. A dangerous vocation."

"I don't ever remember not knowing. I believe I sucked knowledge in my mother's milk. It gave me a secret inner life that as voluptuous as it was tortured. Then I was my first footage of the camps. Maybe I was eight. I had walked in as my parents sat in front of our black and white Westinghouse television. I stood there as my mother wept. My father peered intently at the television as if he might recognize someone he knew. Neither noticed me. while the survivors seem to have the ability to go on with their lives-the bat mitzvahs and weddings of their children are huge, festive affirmations of life- it is their children who spend much of their time not to mention money, talking to Ph. D's and MSW's. IN unaccented, well-reasoned English, we speak of anger, guilt, trying to separate ourselves from our parents and their Holocaust past. Secretly we believe that nothing we can ever do will be as important as our parent's suffering."

Her parents finally want to return to Poland to see and confront their past. Zosha has silently lived yet avoided her parents' past, but finally asks:

"Mom, do you know why you survived." She shook her head. "Lots of people were better people than me, smarter, and they still died. No one knows why." "How did you begin to live?" I asked. "After everything that happened.-" "It just happened," she said. "Did you ever think not to bring children into the world?" "Never" she answered. "They killed us, not our seed." Then she looked at me. "You were our greatest pleasure." My eyes welled up. "Mom--" I said hoarsely, reaching out to touch her arm. "I never meant to pass it on to you." She clutched my hand stroking it. "You were my miracle. Without no scars. When you were born your father said, "This is worth more than a million American dollars."

Finally as a mother herself, Zosha sees the American immigrant life her mother put together. With less aloof sarcasm than before, she remembers the family summer vacations in the Catskills.

"I've returned to the summers of my childhood, to blue paradise in the Catskills. You can still see the letters B UE PAR D SE painted on a whitewashed handball court where no one has played since the children grew up. Blue Paradise is a shtetl where Polish and Yiddish are spoken, except when there's an American around like me. Their days are charmed. They bake the crumb cakes and almond crescent cookies of their childhood, sharing recipe secrets with each other."

By the very nature of the experience, the book's premise is serious. But the author does not get tangled in self pity. She handles the feelings and constant Holocaust reminders with grace, humor, and thought provoking endeavor. We are able to see another side of how a generation handles the Holocaust legacy. This is a lovely book that is the work of a talented writer and should be read.

Whose Holocaust is it?: A Review of The Holocaust Kid by Sonia Pilcer. Persea Books. 180 pp. $23.95

by S.L. Wisenberg
Whose Holocaust is it?

As the survivors of last century's great European atrocity grow older and their numbers dwindle, the question becomes more potent. Zosha Palovsky, Sonia Pilcer's alter ego and the eponymous Holocaust Kid, doesn't hesitate to answer. It's hers, by birthright, because her parents lived through it. "I was a medium, Houdini of the Holocaust, which transmitted itself through me," says Zosha in the story "The Big H."

After hearing a line-up of ministers and poets at the first interfaith Holocaust symposium, Zosha derides those Johnny-come-latelies who use Auschwitz to darken their sonnets. Anxious for recognition, Zosha waits impatiently for her promised turn at the podium. Finally she marches up to the rostrum, as the audience departs, and she reads her poetry, only to be outdone. Another daughter of the Holocaust appears, an exaggerated, more damaged, clownish version of herself. This doppelgänger invites Zosha to a performance about remembrance and revenge (an unsavory event described in a later story). Zosha demands: "What is it about New York City? ...You do something and your only audience gives you a paper about what she's doing."

This is the world of the Holocaust Kid, intense, desperate, leavened by self-aware, self-mocking humor. Billed as autobiographical fiction, these linked stories form a picture of Zosha from her babyhood in a displaced-persons camp--a spark among the ashes--to her own parenthood of an American-born, rap-singing son.

Pilcer has written an often-printed essay about the Holocaust, called "2G"--the Second Generation--the children of survivors. The Holocaust, she wrote wryly, "gives our life gravity and we cling to it. We would be ordinary without it." Pilcer also noted in "2G" that, ironically, the survivors have the ability to go on with their lives. Their children, meanwhile, spend time and money in "unaccented, well-reasoned English" pouring out anger and guilt in offices of therapists. Portions of "2G" surface in The Holocaust Kid--and are read by Zosha's mother snooping in her daughter's apartment. Her mother Genia reacts to the essay by protesting out loud: "The world was crazy, not us," though later admitting to psychological damage. The mother moves from pleasure that her daughter has remembered the family stories, to disgust that Zosha has invaded the parents' privacy. The mother conveniently ignores her own trespassing. The title of this story is "Thieves," and invites the reader to reflect on what each generation takes from the other.

Pilcer lifts some pieces from the essay in two other stories. This is not a criticism--she acknowledges this is memoir cum fiction, going as far as to use a baby picture of herself on the cover, a photo that figures in two stories. This is not the coyness of Kathryn Harrison, who "self-plagiarized" by writing similarly about incest in both a novel and a memoir, or the sly murkiness of Lauren Slater's Lying, complete with an apparently fictional endorsement, and author's afterword extolling the "delightfully bendable" "narrative truth," which she prefers to the more rigid "historical truth."

But Pilcer's book raises questions about fiction and nonfiction. If we did not know that Pilcer was 2G, would the book seem as authentic? Yes. Fiction needs to present a believable world that we care about, and Pilcer succeeds at that. Certain weaker aspects of the book might become forgivable in nonfiction, where the off-stage whisper that "It Really Happened" lends authenticity. But some passages aren't all that interesting, and they wouldn't read better if they happened to be strictly factual. And a number of the stories have weak endings, as if Pilcer hadn't quite decided how to shape the material. She'd have even fewer elements to choose from if she were dealing with just the facts.

Her form may be weak at times, but the elements are often strong. For example, as in "2G" and more successful stories, including the first in the collection, the juxtaposition of new and old worlds works to great effect: "'Genia, when you get to America, you must take Zosha to Hollywood. Get her a scream test,' insisted Mushka Schransky. She had lived as a Christian maid for the family of an SS soldier. 'I tell you, she could be a movie star.'" Enough said.

The second story is told from Genia's point of view in the postwar camp in Germany. At times the narrator is too distant, yet this story has some scenes powerful for their understatement, for presenting the ordinary happenings interposed with the life-changing events: Thema Rosenkratz discovered her sister, Esther, long thought dead, at the Tausgescheft. She had come for salt. Esther was trading a chipped teapot for vinegar. Thema began to scream. Her dark hair was blond so Esther did not recognize her, and she had grown fat. Suddenly, she knew her sister. Dropping the glass bottle of vinegar, she ran to embrace her. You could smell vinegar for days."

There are emotionally rich scenes in "Paskudnyak," a story of Zosha's coming of age in the '60s on 161st Street in a clique of "tough, cigarette-smoking" girls. Zosha's father taunts her by dangling her allowance in front of her, she's thrown out of a movie theater for passionately making out on the floor, and there's another apt juxtaposition: "You must look decent" on Shabbos, Zosha's mother tells her. "They tried to destroy us," she continues, "Now we must show how well we dress." As if that is all it would take. Zosha does not dress well, favoring tight skirts, "roach killer boots" and teased hair, none of which endear her to the white-bearded rabbi who heads a yeshiva where her parents want to enroll her.

Pilcer details the parents' survival during the war and their meeting after, showing us her mother's hope and father's emptiness and the deep yearning of both after the loss of family and home. We're given vivid portraits of the intrusive and over involved mother, throwing herself into copying Vogue patterns on her sewing machine at home, the angry father who "burrowed himself into books like an animal in its hole." Compared to beautifully realized passages and scenes about her parents' lives, Zosha's is rather thinly described. The men in two longer relationships (one, a husband) aren't brought to life. Her inner demons barely get a word in. It's as if Pilcer is afraid of overshadowing the parents' lives with the daughter's. It's not enough to title a story "Do You Deserve to Live?" and pepper it with some guilt and introspection ("How did a person live from day to day? Would I have traded my body for bread?") without really delving in.

The last story provides a happy ending, a relaxing of family tensions, a movement from "the family opera" "to a poem, to a prayer, to the day when we will say Kaddish." The question "Whose Holocaust is it?" is no longer paramount, and has been replaced by the affirmation that connections matter. The family deserves this respite. But as a reader I wanted, in this story and throughout the entire book, more complexity and depth.

The Jerusalem Post
Friday, April 5, 2002
Fiction, 2-G
By Aloma Halter

Sonia Pilcer's The Holocaust Kid makes one think hard about the question: What's good taste in this context? The Holocaust is one of the few subjects that inspires a kind of reticence in most writers - the sense that they will have to tread carefully, if not exactly on eggshells. There are issues like being aware of prurience, or about the sheer magnitude of torture and suffering.

0f course there have been writers like Jerzy Kosinski, whose sensationalism was his hallmark; but among the leading survivor writers, Aharon Appelfeld does not touch the subject, but circles around it, mesmerized and mesmerizing, Primo Levi's writing was marked by the scrupulousness of a scientist, every word weighed.

Not so Sonia Pilcer, who takes no such constraints upon herself in these 15 inter-related short stories. The author of the cult classic Teen Angel (1978), her style is a wild, quirky humor, with a huge penchant for self-exposure.

In The Holocaust Kid, overkill and wry comedy are her chosen tools, usually they work, occasionally they fall short. The daughter of' survivors - a 2-G (shorthand for "second generation") - Pilcer's stories all take the perspective of the same narrator, feisty Zosha. who was born in displaced persons camp in Germany, but grew up in Brooklyn, joined a Latina gang and refused to attend a yeshiva.

"The Big H" set in 1974, is about a young woman who wants to read her poems (unscheduled) at a Holocaust conference. When it ends without the MC according her the slot he promised, she realizes it is now or never to seize the moment: "If I was truly the Holocaust Kid, living for it, saving myself like a virgin bride for the occasion of my deflowering, now was the time. I wanted to be there." So she strides up to the rostrum, seizes the microphone, and continues reading as the audience escapes through the doors.

In "Imagine Auschwitz," the narrator does a double take: "I stare down the tracks. A transport could arrive. My mother's family. My father's." Wandering into the Auschwitz cafeteria, she's horrified at the standard, tourist food served there - "a long counter on which sandwiches, bowls of salad, plastic-wrapped pastries are displayed. I think of the turbid soup, the crusts of bread they had eaten to survive. Why not show that? There are tiny bottles of vin rouge. I know I can't touch this food."

The good taste/bad taste dichotomy in this collection pivots around the dissonance of Pilcer pointing out things like the travesty of a cafeteria at Auschwitz, while talking in jargon that seems lifted from Madonna's lyrics - "saving myself up like a virgin bride." She favors over-writing and has a penchant for sentences like "my eyes glow like bone splinters."

However, the stories vibrate with Pilcer's own tremendous energy and vitality, which eventually sideline the issue of bad taste: in the midst of all this death, the writer herself is so alive. If she's like a person shouting down a phone because she doubts she'll be heard - it's true. There is a great distance. Apart from the survivors, and their families, for whom the Shoah is still very much present in their lives, the rest of the world is not only 57 years away from Auschwitz, but getting further at a dizzying speed. The reviewer is a Jerusalem- based translator and writer

Hadassah magazine
January 2002 Vol. 83 No. 5

Losing, Seeking and Accepting One's Identity
By Alan L. Berger

The Holocaust Kid
by Sonia Pilcer (Persea Books)

The Holocaust Kid is Sonia Pilcers fifth novel and her most direct literary encounter with her Holocaust legacy. The author, born in a DP camp, is an articulate and unerring guide to the psychosocial impact of her parents' survival on her life. This inheritance can be formulated as a, special set of questions. What is my relationship to the Holocaust, my parents? Would I have survived? "Do You Deserve to Live?"-the title story in this daunting work expresses perhaps the most terrifying question of all.

Pilcer paints a vivid portrait of a rebellious daughter's coming of age in the 60's, with an overprotective mother and a stem father. Even as the young woman works through her tragic legacy, the novel underscores that many Holocaust questions remain eternally open. In America, Genia and Henick view their daughter, Zosha Hana, named after both of their mothers, as "their Landsberg rniracle." Yet the youngster has a turbulent youth; she refuses to attend a yeshiva and joins a Latino girls club. An angry Henick asks, "I survived for this?, I should have died in the camps." Later, Zosha lives with a German man and has an abortion; Heniek declares her dead.

But Zosha deeply feels her Holocaust inheritance. "I remembered the Holocaust every day of my life. Never forget. That was my tattoo." At an 1974 International Symposium on the Holocaust held at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, Zosha recalls that "Spirits of the dead cried out in me," Opposed to this personal relationship are the professional academics who speak of suffering and martyrs in a "scholarly drone." When the Cathedral's dean reneges on his promise to allow her to read her poetry, Zosha reads it anyway.

Zosha expresses the central question of her generation: Where does she fit in? Though she had not even been born she feels overwhelmed by the terrible events. Standing in the shower, she wishes she could stand still forever, the water running over her body, "free of [her parents] and their painful history."

Pilcer's novel makes a crucial distinction between Holocaust hucksters and those who authentically confront the Shoah. For example, one character, The Trauma Queen, herself a second-generation member, specializes in perpetuating hatred for all Germans. Zosha goes on a pilgrimage to Auschwitz, a journey that has assumed ritual proportion. Enraged, she throws a large stone against the infamous Arbeit Macht Frei sign. But the Holocaust is too enormous to be defeated by rage.

Zosha finally comes to grips with her legacy. She makes peace with her parents and writes their story. She marries Avi, an Israeli member of the second generation; their son, Jesse, is named after her murdered uncle. Although Auschwitz casts a long and ominous shadow, the Holocaust kid has become a reflective woman and mother, a bearer of witness whose son has a close relationship with his survivor grandfather. Transmitting the story of the Holocaust continues.

WOMEN'S REVIEW OF BOOKS
Hostages to History
by Jane DeLynn
published in The Women's Review of Books, September 2001

The Holocaust Kid by Sonia Pilcer

Readers of Sonia Pilcer's first novel, Teen Angel, know her as a master of early 60s adolescent girl rebellion, that time of greasers and teased hair just before the Beatles crossed the Atlantic to change the world. The voice of that novel's tough young protagonist can be heard again throughout The Holocaust Kid, only this time the focus isn't getting in with the right kids at school but what Zosha Palovsky irreverently calls "the Big H." For Zosha is the child of Holocaust survivors-father at Auschwitz, mother in a labor camp. The experience is theirs, but emotionally-- if vicariously and unwillingly-- it's hers as well.

Perhaps even more than "as well." Whereas Zosha's parents somehow manage to fall in love soon after the Liberation, escape from the still-virulent anti-Semitism of Poland to the (ironically) safe haven of a German DP camp, and start their own family to replace the ones they've lost- Zosha's life seems in perpetual limbo. She doesn't get married, doesn't have a child, won't even decorate her apartment. Outwardly she lives a normal life-has lovers, smokes pot-but a dark knowledge is her constant companion, haunting her dreams at night, filling her mind with critical commentary during the day ("You think you're a real writer? Shlockmeister. Try standing in the freezing snow for two hours without shoes"), and becomes the metaphor closest at hand for almost anything: a burning fingernail, for instance, summoning thoughts of the crematorium.

Pilcer's a good enough writer that Zosha's story would be interesting were she merely your standard neurotic, but what gives the book its resonance and power is that the syndrome is not Zosha's alone, but common to the children of Holocaust survivors-known as the Second Generation, or 2Gs. Pilcer has written about the syndrome before, but this the first time she's done so in fiction: autobiographical fiction, to be sure--she even includes a self-reflexive story about her mother's (rather negative) response to her writing-- but fiction nonetheless. As Zosha/Pilcer writes in the notebook she keeps as part of her "Holocaust files": "While the survivors seem to have the ability to go on with their lives...it is their children who spend much of their time, not to mention money, talking to Ph.D.'s, and MSWs. In unaccented, well-reasoned English, we speak of anger, guilt, trying to separate ourselves from our parents and their Holocaust past. Secretly, we believe that nothing we can ever do will be as important as our parents' suffering," Of course she's right: what in her own life could be as important as her parent's suffering? In some odd sense 2Gs resemble the children of celebrities, eternally inadequate before the legends who bore them. Celeb kids can try to beat their parents at their own game, but that particular form of competition is of course not an option for a 2G. The Holocaust Kid is not a novel, but a collection of short stories.

But unlike the majority of books in this increasingly common genre of stories revolving around a single character, The Holocaust Kid has the scope and progression and emotionally satisfying resolution of a novel. Arranged in an order that makes emotional rather than chronological sense, they range in time from Europe right after the war (where people tell Zosha's mother she resembles the famous American movie star "Elisabet Taylor") to a bungalow colony in the Catskills where Zosha's son Jesse (named after Zosha's mother's lost baby brother) hammily performs for Zosha's aging parents and their survivor friends, symbolically--if a little sentimentally--completing the circle of life.

Whereas the stories that detail Zosha's parents' life before the Holocaust or their struggles to adapt to their Americanized daughter are the more tender and touching, it's the ones dramatizing the teenage and adult Zosha's conflicts about the Holocaust that are the most striking and original. Zosha showing up stoned for a Yom Hashoah (Day of Remembrance of the Holocaust) ceremony at Temple Emanu-El, her attempt to read her Holocaust poems at St. John's the Divine on the occasion of the first inter-faith Holocaust conference (the Right Reverend Paul Moore, Jr. forgets he's promised to let her read --"Once again, a Jew abandoned by the Church"), an erotic encounter with a well-known Holocaust writer whose fame and black boots excite her, her revulsion from an Exorcism where Jews are exhorted to express their hatred for the Nazis.

These are crude but powerful stories, powerful perhaps because they're crude, for they say things that aren't usually said: how Jews at times hate both the Nazis and the victims, that there is-even to 2Gs-- something sexy about Nazism, that there's "no business like Shoah business" and rivalries for success in this arena are the same as in any other. The tone and geography and even some of the material of The Holocaust Kid will be familiar to readers of Pilcer's earlier novels, but this is clearly her strongest, deepest work, one that will bring up conflicting emotions and resonate long after the book has been put down. As a lifelong New Yorker, I enjoyed the way the book so clearly evoked the city as it used to be: Pilcer, who has an uncanny ability to evoke an entire character with but a single line of dialogue, is eye and ear perfect on the small details--from playing potsy and Double Dutch on the sidewalk to expressions such as "speedy Gonzalez" & "flibbertigibbet." As a lifelong Jew, I enjoyed her depiction of the various cross-sections of New York Jewish life: the wealthy, snobby upper East Side German Reform Jews, the intellectual and leftist Jews of the upper West Side, the more religious, lower-class, and crude DPs from Washington Heights or the Bronx who "talk about shvartzes as if they were subhumans." This world, too, is now mostly part of the past, as survivors vanish and Shoah consciousness and a resurgence of a more heartfelt worship (Reconstructionism on the one hand, a return to Orthodoxy on the other) seem to have forever changed the nature of New York Jewry.

As a Jew who often--jokingly, "of course"--refers to even current-day Germans as "Nazis," the issues posed by Pilcer's book are ones I've lived with all my life. Many nights I've woken up panicked, running from men in gray uniforms and boots; what family I have started very, very late; and I'm all too aware-even in the midst of paralyzing depression-of the relative triviality of what is bothering me. For me history also stops at the Holocaust: other exterminations seem mere afterthoughts: been there, done that. But I'm not a 2G, my parents were born and raised comfortably in America. So the scope of the syndrome goes beyond what Pilcer suggests-far beyond, perhaps, for it's not just Jews, of those born in the immediate post-war era, who are having kids in their forties.

This may be stretching it, but is it possible that traumatizing knowledge of the Holocaust and other mass exterminations is the reason so many people of my generation have gravitated to the various forms of New Age thinking and practices, all of which emphasize-from est to Deepak Chopra to cognitive therapy-- letting go of the past and being in the present? I'm of two minds about this. Intellectually I subscribe to the metaphysics of meditation--that the only moment that exists is right now-and have attempted the Buddhist meditation known as "loving-kindness"-- trying, no doubt unsuccessfully, to include Nazis in the mix. On the other hand-and Jews are nothing if not a people of "on the other hand-I also believe that those who don't remember history are doomed to repeat it, and that just because the world has found no practical way to exact justice for the murder of millions, does not mean that somewhere, somehow--if only in the heart and mind--these seemingly ordinary, "decent" citizens of Germany, the USSR, Japan, China, Rwanda, and the former Yugoslavia, etc. should not be held personally accountable.

NEW JERSEY JEWISH NEWS
United Jewish Federation of MetroWest

'Holocaust Kid' tells the story of a 2G rebel
by Sanford Pinsker

Sonia Pilcer's disturbing, fiercely written book occupies the gray area between autobiography and fiction. Its 15 "stories," many previously printed in such newspapers as The Jerusalem Post, The Forward, and the New York Post, follow the darkly comic turmoil of Zosha Palovsky, a child of Holocaust survivors.

In her case being a 2G - a member of the second generation - is cause enough for rebellion. As a teenager, she joins a smart-talking, sassy-dressing Latina gang and refuses to attend yeshiva.

There is, in short, nothing of the sentimental, much less of the pietistic, in Pilcer's protagonist. She wants nothing more than to crawl out from under the long shadow cast by her parents' horrific experiences during the war; at the same time, however, she finds herself inexplicably drawn to that part of herself she took in with her mother's milk.

As an adult, Zosha butters the bread she usually eats alone in her Manhattan apartment by writing shlock articles for Movie Screen magazine, a glossy that dishes the dirt about stars like Elizabeth Taylor; in her spare time, however, she writes paragraphs like the following:

And I, their daughter, live in two time frames. Normal, shared reality: everyone stops at the red light. The other zone has no temporal sense. Burnt by a dog-eared yellow star, sign of the Jew, rising, hungry eyes, overripe crazylegs nerve. I live in the ghetto of the dead.

The Holocaust Kid explores both zones sometimes reimagining and recreating a past Zosha knows only second-hand, and sometimes concentrating on the rage she feels as others, however well meaning, try to memorialize the Holocaust.

Thus, Zosha takes us to a Yom Hashoa service at Fifth Avenue's swanky Temple Emanuel, as well as to a Holocaust psychodrama put on by an in-your-face "performance artist." Not surprisingly, Zosha finds these whipped-up occasions deeply offensive - and all- the more so when her nagging mother nags her to attend.

Zosha's "problem," as it were, is one without a solution:

Remember. Made up of the Latin re, "back," "again" and memore, "mindful," Mind full of what? The heaviest densest guilt trip in the galaxy.

Was this survivor guilt? That's what the good Dr. Lipschitz [her psychoanalyst]- told me. A solid classification. Survivor's guilt. How could I have survivor's guilt if I wasn't a survivor? I was born five years after the war had ended. And yet. In my deepest, most involuntary place, my stomach, I carried the Holocaust. I had all the moves. I was born with the stealth, with the terrors.

Zosha is relentless and unsparing - with others and, of course, with herself. She is also, I hasten to add, often as funny as she is exasperating.

No doubt many readers will find Zosha's tirades more than they can bear, especially when they learn about her German boyfriend and her other sexual adventures. For a very long time, she looks as if she will never give her parents the naches they want, much less the grandchild they desperately hope for.

But without revealing too much, let me simply say that Zosha's story ultimately takes what everyone will agree is a positive turn. Until the book's last pages, however, readers would be well advised to buckle their seat belts, for Pilcer takes us on a rocky, often heart-wrenching ride.

ALBANY TIMES UNION
Inheriting The Past

Holocaust's 'privileged generation' questions own existence
By MICHAEL LOPEZ, Staff writer
First published: Sunday, August 12, 2001

CHATHAM -- On a day full of summery promise, The Summit Cafe teems with life, and Sonia Pilcer is in the middle of it.

The cafe is a pleasant village hub, where Pilcer, an author who lives in Copake Lake, Columbia County, delightedly runs into other transplanted writers and artists. They vie for space with a flood of teenagers from a nearby Ukrainian summer camp. People order their iced teas and espressos and a boy practices the harmonica and all is well.

But before this buoyant moment, there has been another for Pilcer, who has just finished explaining what it is like to have inherited the Holocaust.

As the child of Holocaust survivors, Pilcer is part of a "privileged generation," in the words of Elie Wiesel: children who remember things they have not lived, children who are survivors' "justification."

Life for these children does go on -- there was a 1960s adolescence of kohl eye makeup and bouffant hairdos, Borscht Belt summers, college, and now, their own children -- but there is also, always, this thread of despair.

Pilcer opens her new book, "The Holocaust Kid" (Persea Books; 180 pages; $23.95) with the question posed by the title of the first chapter, "Do You Deserve To Live?"

"I hate to say it, but this is a question I ask myself regularly," says Pilcer, whose father survived Auschwitz and mother lived through a forced labor camp in Czestochowa, Poland.

"It's such a miracle that they lived, and therefore, it's a miracle that I live. Therefore, is my life worth this, am I a good enough person, have I accomplished enough to merit, when so many others have died?"

Pilcer addresses this urgent question -- weighed by "the heaviest, densest guilt trip in the galaxy" -- through Zosha Palovsky, the main character in "The Holocaust Kid" who runs from -- and toward -- her parents' experiences.

Drawn from life: "The Holocaust Kid" is fiction.

However, Pilcer draws on her own life to help achieve a larger truth by creating what poet Marianne Moore called "imaginary gardens with real toads in them." Pilcer, 52, was born in a Displaced Persons camp in Landsberg, Germany, after the war, and, until young adulthood, lived with squelched memories of the Holocaust.

She learned only the main truths of how her parents, and thus she, existed: Her mother escaped from death by being selected for labor merely on the basis of her noticeable white kerchief; her father managed to slip away from an Auschwitz death march.

Zosha, on the other hand, seemingly is not a child of the Holocaust, but a daughter of New York's Washington Heights. She is a sassy young woman who almost perversely sets about separating herself from the war experiences of her parents, Polish Jews. The brash teenager runs with a wannabe gang of Latinas, in young womanhood takes a German lover, and, as a young professional, invents juicy celebrity stories for a fan magazine.

This is Zosha the American sophisticate whose parents are her foils: Heniek and Genia both struggle to comprehend the modern world in which their daughter operates. They express their frustrations differently -- Heniek with bursts of anger, Genia, with needling -- but both carry for their daughter a "fierce, anxious love."

But, unavoidably, Zosha also is a scribe of the Holocaust.

So is author Pilcer, who, through Zosha, angrily answers the injunction, "Remember," with the rhetorical question, "Remember what? Lives extinguished? Privates mutiliated? Dead grandparents? Nonexistent uncles, aunts, cousins?"

Balancing act: Through flinty dialogue and artful imagery, Pilcer shows that survivors themselves may have done a better job of balancing past and present than their children.

Every second Wednesday, they played canasta in our living room. As they tossed bright plastic chips and picked up cards, blue numbers flashing on the insides of their arms, the stories multiplied.

"Pish, posh. I knew Mushka in the camp when she wasn't such a fancy lady. She cleaned toilets with the rest of us."

"If Bolek hadn't given me his piece of bread, I wouldn't be here. Lucky me, I was dealt two red threes!"

And, if there is a defining moment that explains what their children were up against, it is when the teenage Zosha angers her father with her heavy makeup and tight skirt. "I survived for this?" he exclaims.

By the late 1960s, Holocaust victims became survivors, and a previously unreceptive public welcomed stories that Pilcer never got to hear as a child.

"The parents really tried not to poison us with the horror of their experiences, what they had seen, what they had known," says Pilcer. "They thought the best thing that they could do was not talk, because if you talked, it's like spreading the poison. But it turns out, that particular strategy backfired. There's some secret, or something in their background, that (children) need to learn about."

Consequently, a whole network of children dubbed "2G," as numerous Web sites confirm, wrestle with those "iconic" stories of parents here only because the gas chamber malfunctioned or because they played dead in a mass grave.

"We don't know what to make of these stories, because, had it been slightly different, we wouldn't be here," Pilcer says.

Exploring survival: "The Holocaust Kid," with its scrim of fiction to protect herself and her elderly parents, has allowed Pilcer to freely explore the survival of her own generation.

For these children, "nothing sets you free."

"You have good food and good friends and sit in modern life, but you also have these feelings. It really is living in two worlds," says Pilcer. In the existential one -- to be resisted -- most things seem to not matter.

But Pilcer is comforted by the truth that "nothing makes you free." (Fellow "2G" writer Melvin Jules Bukiet uses the phrase, a reference to the Germans' command at Auschwitz, "Work Makes You Free," for the title of an upcoming anthology, including Pilcer's work.)

"Nothing will set you free, but perhaps that knowledge will help you be a little bit freer," Pilcer says.

By the end of "The Holocaust Kid," Zosha Palovsky is more at peace. There is a transforming, healing moment, when Zosha's father lifts her son and exclaims, "L'Chaim!"

To life.

Pilcer, the mother of a 12-year-old son, understands. "A child is anti-despair and offers the hope of the future."

THE BERKSHIRE EAGLE
July 20, 2001

THE HOLOCAUST KID

Tales From A Child Of Survivors
Review by Seth Rogovoy

In one of the more outrageous scenes in her outrageous new book, The Holocaust Kid-- outrageous not necessarily because of what Pilcer has written, but because what she has written is so clearly a reflection of outrageous reality -- the thinly-veiled protagonist, Zosha Palovsky, is attending an interfaith conference on the Holocaust at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Manhattan.

Zosha has been sitting for hours in the hard pews of the cathedral, listening to a procession of pompous academics, theologians and artists -- few if any of whom had any direct connection to the Holocaust -- drone on about its significance. The child of survivors and born in a displaced persons (DP) camp, Zosha has a few ideas of her own about the meaning of this meaning-shattering event.

The audacity of those who would profess to know anything about the Holocaust gets the better of Zosha, and her resentment builds until she expresses what can be read on some level as the book's credo, the inspiration and motivation for Pilcer's stunning and at times shocking book: "I was a medium, Houdini of the Holocaust, which transmitted itself through me, the uncut umbilical cord of my mother feeding me blood images vivid as they were terrifying. Spirits of the dead cried out of me ... I would show them what it meant to have one's kind extinguished in history's bonfire, and the only living family singed at the source so all that released itself with the exuberance of nature came slow and with great difficulty.'

This is what Pilcer succeeds in doing with wit, courage, and no small degree of tenderness and affection in her taboo-busting book, "The Holocaust Kid"; Applying the same sort of streetwise sass she used in cult-classics of urban life like "Teen Angel" and "Little Darlings"; Pilcer paints a vivid portrait of Zosha Palovsky, a child of survivors trying to come to terms with her parent's unfathomable experience through her own insatiable curiosity, creativity and thirst for life experience.

Zosha is a member of a select group -- or rather, a group resulting from an elite selection that took place before its members were born. Zosha characterizes this group, variously called 2Gs or Second Generation, thusly: "While the survivors seem to have the ability to go on with their lives ... it is their children who spend much of their time, not to mention money, talking to Ph.D.s and MSWs. In unaccented, well-reasoned English, we speak of anger, guilt, trying to separate ourselves from our parents and their Holocaust past. Secretly, we believe that nothing we can ever do will be as important as our parent's suffering."

This is Zosha's sentence, her plight, and in some ways "The Holocaust Kid" is her response, her "Portnoy's Complaint" her attempt at doing something with or creating something out of her parents' suffering, from which she cannot wholly separate herself.

The challenge to do so is laid directly at her feet by Uly Oppenheim, a Holocaust Studies professor and professional lothario, a "Shoah Casanova"; who makes it his life's work to bed as many 2Gs as possible. "The Second Generation has no real experiential content. Just fantasies, overactive, morbid imaginations," says Oppenheim. In some small way, "The Holocaust Kid" is Zosha's response to Oppenheim's condescension.

Pilcer's book defies Oppenheim's pat diagnosis of what ails 2Gs. It is Elie Wiesel shot through with a heavy dose of Henry Miller and a little bit of early Philip Roth for good measure. There will undoubtedly be some who feel that Pilcer's portrayal of Zosha's parents, Genia and Heniek, is uncharitable, that she sets them up as figures for mockery. But Zosha has immense respect and admiration for her parents -- concentration camp survivors who had to escape Poland (by smuggling themselves into Germany, of all places) after the war when murderous Poles threatened to do to them what the Germans didn't do. Their lives are her legacy, and in the end, the stories that Zosha tells - Pilcer's stories -- are theirs as much as her own.

Zosha writes, "It is our way to tell tales, bug-eyed people of the Book. We become writers and therapists because we believe in the power of storytelling. As if the right arrangement of words could release us."

Pilcer's book is labeled just Stories; and as such begs the question as to whether it is to be read as autobiography, fiction, or that nebulous, in-between region called creative nonfiction.

Although the book makes no claims to being so, there is a novelistic unity and progression connecting the stories. You can graph Zosha's growth through the men who pass through her bed, from the greaser in the movie theater through Ludwig, the Russian-German lover with a neo-Nazi past, through Uly Oppenheim through Avi, the slightly-shellshocked Israeli expatriate artist and cab driver who, like Zosha, was born in a DP camp.

In the end, however, it doesn't matter. The measure of the stories is to be taken on their own merits. And it is on their own merits that the stories measure up. We can't ask of them any more than they are willing to give us, and what they give us is blood, sweat, tears, laughter, sex -- and the indisputable ring of authenticity.

Seth Rogovoy is the author of "The Essential Klezmer: A Music Lover's Guide to Jewish Roots and Soul Music."

ALA BOOKLIST, June 15, 2001

Like the protagonist in this collection of 15 interconnected short stories, Pilcer is the daughter of Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. Having first addressed many of the issues treated here in her 1990 essay "2G," Pilcer now turns to autobiographical fiction as a way of dealing with the legacy of the past. The stories, set in the 1960s, find Zosha struggling to be free of her parents' memories and expectations. While her mother beseeches her to marry and have grandchildren, Zosha furtively writes stories that reflect her search for an identity of her own. she doesn't want to be merely 2G, the second generation. If her parents survived to be witnesses of the Holocaust, why must she devote her life attesting to their suffering? Ultimately, Zosha marries Avi, another 2G, and they have a son, bringing forth the third generation. Wit and humor interface with stark realities and unanswerable questions as Zosha looks for a way to celebrate life and remember the past. Provocative fiction, not just for the second generation but for all our collective memories.

KIRKUS REVIEWS June 1, 2001

Pilcer, Sonia
THE HOLOCAUST KID
Persea (192 pp.)
$23.95
July 19, 2001
ISBN: 0-89255-261-1

Fifteen finely crafted, interconnected stories, loosely based on the life of novelist Pilcer (a novel: I-Land, 1987, etc.) that cumulatively reflect the tensions haunting the children of Holocaust survivors.

Zosha Palovsky, named after her two grandmothers who died during the war, prefers to call herself Zoe. Though born in Europe in a camp for DPs, she was only a toddler when she arrived in New York with her parents Genia and Heniek. Zoe's predicament - how to reconcile her dreams with her parents' experience - is central to each story. The first, 'Do You Deserve to Live?' is narrated by Zoe herself, who works at a movie magazine where she summons her 'schlock muse' to write about stars, though she'd rather be writing about her family. She takes drugs, sleeps around, and says what she thinks, all shocking to her parents - especially Genia, who wishes she were a proper young lady. In school, she wants to be like the Latino girls who wear lots of makeup, and she refused to go to a Yeshiva ('Paskudnyak'). In 'First Story' and 'Survivors Dance,' Genia revisits the past, recalling, respectively, how she was saved from the gas chamber because she was wearing a white head scarf and instead was sent to a labor camp; and how she met Heniek after the war. In 'Our Father, Our King,' Heniek recalls his escape from Auschwitz. As she grows older, Zoe, who once arrived stoned at a Holocaust Memorial service ('Remember 6,000,000'), begins to appreciate her parents more, accepting the burden of their legacy. A visit to Auschwitz ('Imagine Auschwitz') helps her understand why they wanted her to live when so many others had died. And in the final piece,'Blue Paradise,'Zoe - now married and herself a mother - vacationing with aging Genia and Heniek, rejoices that they can 'grow old, and no other member of their family could, old enough to love a grandchild.'

Fresh and affecting takes on deep if familiar ground.

Oscar Hijuelos, the author of "Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love"

THE HOLOCAUST KID is a serious but often funny chronicle, whose life-affirming story is told with verve, wit, and the kind of passion that is often missing from contemporary fiction. Good books are about personality, soul, and history--and THE HOLOCAUST KID serves these elements up with abundant charm. In short, this is a collection to be read and cherished.

Melvin Jules Bukiet, the author of "After" and forthcoming "Strange Fire"

There's not an ounce of piety in Sonia Pilcer's THE HOLOCAUST KID, and that's just the way it should be. Alternately funny and fierce, her chronicle of growing up with parents with numbers on their arms is as caustic as the numbers themselves. No one gets out alive.

Thane Rosenbaum, the author of "Second Hand Smoke" and "Elijah Visible"

Sonia Pilcer is a passionate, witty and searing writer whose words evoke all the pain, nuance and insight of the post-Holocaust experience, revealing a world in which she has both lived, and reimagined.