ISBN:
9781773632186
Language:
English
Pages:
311 Seiten
,
Portraits
Year of publication:
2019
Parallel Title:
Erscheint auch als
Parallel Title:
Erscheint auch als Weiss, Suzanne Berliner, 1941- Holocaust to resistance
DDC:
335.0092
Keywords:
Weiss, Suzanne Berliner
;
Geschichte
;
Politische Beteiligung
;
Politik
;
Frau
;
Protestbewegung
;
Kanada
;
Weiss, Suzanne Berliner / 1941-
;
Jewish socialists / United States / Biography
;
Women socialists / United States / Biography
;
Women political activists / United States / Biography
;
Jews / United States / Biography
;
Holocaust survivors / United States / Biography
;
Holocaust survivors
;
Jewish socialists
;
Jews
;
Women political activists
;
Women socialists
;
United States
;
Autobiographies
;
Biographies
;
Autobiographies
;
Autobiografie
;
Weiss, Suzanne Berliner 1941-
;
Kanada
;
Politik
;
Protestbewegung
;
Frau
;
Politische Beteiligung
;
Geschichte
Abstract:
"Theme: After a major human catastrophe, an isolated survivor begins a quest for identity, striving to forge links with the human community and its efforts for social justice. She finds common ground with a people oppressed in her name. Summary: In 1945, at the age of four, I was taken from the farm family in France that had protected me from the Nazi holocaust and was placed in a series of Communist-run orphanages. A troubled and sickly child, I learned that I was a Jew and therefore despised by many people. Nonetheless, I gained a belief in world peace and brotherhood. When I was nine, I was adopted and taken to the U.S. by a radical New York family. Life in the Bronx offered new pleasures, including a miraculous reunion with three survivors from my lost family of the Holocaust. However, I was haunted by the nuclear arms race and the anti-Communist witch-hunt of the 1950s. My adoptive family was dysfunctional, and I responded with anger and a fierce drive for autonomy.
Abstract:
This landed me in a detention house at age 16. A year after my release, already a socialist by inclination, I encountered a socialist organization and became a political activist. My life merged with the nascent student radicalization and was infused with joyous identification with the Cuban revolution, Black power, and women's liberation. I was a pioneer activist in the ultimately successful movement to end the Vietnam war. I opposed Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands, which I saw as an injustice contrary to the spirit of my Judaism. I pioneered in helping women become established in non-traditional trades, first as a leader of a socialist print shop and then as production worker in unionized oil refineries. I made successive attempts to find my own voice in the movement for social justice. In the 1980s, however, with the labor and socialist movements in full retreat, I turned to long-postponed needs of personal development: marriage, family, university education, and career.
Abstract:
During these years, I visited Poland, homeland of my martyred mother, and made startling discoveries regarding the fate of her Jewish community there during the Nazi holocaust. I also returned to France, the country of my birth. I gathered family documents, hired a private eye, and linked up with my orphan buddies there. I forged ties of friendship with the French family that had cared for me when I emerged from hiding and researched how it was that I and so many other hidden Jewish children had survived. As the new millennium dawned, now in my sixties, I resumed socialist activity. I deepened my identification as a Jew by championing the victimized Palestinians, seeing a parallel between their defense of ancestral lands with that of indigenous people in the Americas. I reinterpreted my personal Holocaust experience as a triumph of the human spirit amidst grievous losses.
Note:
Includes index
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