Book description
The term “Holocaust survivors” is often associated with Jewish
communities in New York City or along Florida's Gold Coast.
Traditionally, tales of America's Holocaust survivors, in both
individual and cultural histories, have focused on places where people
fleeing from Nazi atrocities congregated in large numbers for comfort
and community following World War II. Yet not all Jewish refugees chose
to settle in heavily populated areas of the United States. In This Is
Home Now: Kentucky's Holocaust Survivors Speak, oral historian Arwen
Donahue and photographer Rebecca Gayle Howell focus on overlooked
stories that unfold in the aftermath of the Holocaust. They present the
accounts of Jewish survivors who resettled not in major metropolitan
areas but in southern, often rural, communities. Many of the survivors
in these smaller communities did not even seek out the few fellow Jewish
residents already there. Donahue transcribes the accounts as she heard
them, keeping true to the voices of those she interviewed. One of the
survivors who shares her tale, Sylvia Green, describes the pain and
desolation of her experiences in the Nazi death camps with a voice that
reveals both her German-Polish heritage and her subsequent small-town
life in Winchester, Kentucky. The Hungarian-born Paul Schlisser has an
equally complex voice, a mix of phrases learned in the U. S. Army in
Vietnam and regional speech patterns acquired in his adopted home near
Fort Knox. Donahue's collection of voices, accompanied by Howell's
poignant photographs, identifies each storyteller as an American-and as
a Kentuckian. Like many others of diverse backgrounds before them,
Holocaust survivors joined the “melting pot” as a haven from the
suffering in their native lands, but they eventually came to regard
America as home. Although they speak of atrocities, most often
experienced when they were children and unable to fully comprehend the
situation, they also emphasize the comfort of acceptance-not just by
Jewish communities but also by a state that has long equated “religion”
with Christianity alone. Kentucky is not known for its cultural and
religious diversity, yet these stories reveal one of the many ways that
the state has become home to a wide spectrum of immigrants-people who
once were strangers but now are its own. Arwen Donahue has served as
program coordinator in the Department of Oral History at the United
States Holocaust Museum and managed its Post-Holocaust Interview
Project. Rebecca Gayle Howell is a writer and documentary photographer.
Currently, she is on the creative writing faculty at Morehead State
University.
