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This 16-year-old turned her grandmother’s Holocaust survival story into a novel
(New York Jewish Week) — In May of 1937, 7-year-old Inge Eisinger lived in a luxurious Vienna apartment with a pantry stocked with favorite foods and a staff to keep her company. Though she had a strained relationship with her mother and an absent father, Inge, who was mostly raised by her maternal grandmother Anna, was living a charmed life.
This is the scene that opens “Running for Shelter,” a young adult novel about the Holocaust written by a young adult herself: 16-year-old Suzette Sheft, who is a junior at the Horace Mann School in the Bronx. In the novel, Sheft retells her grandmother’s story of surviving the Holocaust.
Published by Amsterdam Publishers, which specializes in Holocaust memoirs, the book is a delicate and powerful reminder of the importance of recording one’s family history. It’s a lesson Sheft learned too early in life: Her father died of pancreatic cancer when Sheft was just 13 and she soon realized she was forgetting all the stories he told her about his childhood.
“I fantasized about rewinding time, so I could go back and record my favorite stories about his childhood,” Sheft writes in an author’s note. “I wished I had taken the time to write these stories down when I had the chance, because his death allowed me to understand the vitality of preserving the stories of our loved ones before it is too late.”
In memory of her father, Sheft recorded the story of his mother, her grandmother Monique Sheft, who was once the Viennese school girl Inge Eisinger.
In pre-war Austria, Eisinger had been living a completely assimilated life — so much so that her parents never even told her that she was Jewish. Following the Nazi takeover of Austria, her mother managed to whisk the two of them away to Switzerland, then Paris, but soon abandoned her. After a twisting and tragic story, Eisinger eventually reunited with her grandmother and moved to a village in Central France to wait out the war, changing her name to the more French “Monique.”
Sheft’s novel ends in 1946, when the two are on the boat to New York after the war and Eisinger’s grandmother reveals to her that she and her family are actually Jewish.
In spite of this — or perhaps because of it — Sheft, who lives in Manhattan with her mom, her twin brother and two dogs, is very committed to her Jewish identity. “Although my grandmother never really practiced Judaism, my dad was very involved in the Jewish world,” she said. “He was very passionate about Jewish causes and just Judaism, in general. So I felt very connected to the Jewish world because of him.”
The New York Jewish Week talked with Sheft about what the book means to her, why its subject matter is important and what she learned in the process of putting it together.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
New York Jewish Week: What was the process of writing the book; how did the idea begin and how did you collect your grandmother’s story?
Suzette Sheft: I had heard a lot of my grandmother’s stories from my dad. I always had an interest in the Holocaust — I would go to Holocaust museums in every city I visited, and I almost exclusively read books about World War II and the Holocaust growing up. So I kind of knew in the back of my head that I wanted to do something like this, but [my father’s death] sparked and ignited the necessity of doing it as soon as possible.
As for the process, a few summers ago I spent a week with my grandmother, interviewing her every day about her escape from Austria to France. At first she shared physical elements of her life, like her apartment and her family dynamics and her school life, but then she began to talk to me about the time leading up to the war — the years before the Germans invaded Austria. As she spoke, I recorded everything she said in bullet point form and I would periodically stop and ask for more detail. The next day, at the beginning of the conversation, I would recap what we had talked about, and then allow her to elaborate or clarify the story.
Later, I wanted to widen my perspective and uncover other stories and details that she may have forgotten, so I watched an interview she did with the USC Shoah Foundation. This was really helpful because there were some details that she had forgotten or that she had left out.
Even though the book is about your grandmother’s life, you wrote it as fiction. How much of the story came from your grandmother’s details, and how much did you have to research or create on your own?
Every event that happens is true, and everything actually happened to her, but there are some small details that I embellished. For me, it was really helpful because, while I love creativity and writing, I sometimes struggle to pick an idea. So the fact that she had all these little stories, and I could expand from those, was something I loved while writing this. I had to use fiction when describing the atmosphere of certain places and also to write the dialogue because I can’t know exactly what they said or how they said it.
Do you have a favorite story your grandma told you that you made sure to get in the book?
Inge goes to a boarding school [in France] with her host family and there the children play a game where they pick someone to be the “torturer,” who is usually whoever they think the ugliest person is. My grandma had red hair and green eyes, and I guess she wasn’t the traditional standard of beauty. They picked her to be the torturer and she would have to pull people’s hair and scratch them. There would also be a queen, who was usually the prettiest girl with blond hair and blue eyes, and she would be protected. I thought it was interesting because to me it was the children’s way of understanding what was going on in the world around them. It’s a bit complicated, but when she told me this story I was completely shocked. It was really fascinating.
For people your age, why do you think Holocaust education is still relevant and important?
Some people my age don’t know anything about the Holocaust. I recently came across a statistic that talked about how little Gen Z knew about the Holocaust. There’s also been a spike in antisemitism and a decrease in awareness of history. For example, with Kanye West, who has a lot of followers, saying antisemitic remarks, a lot of people are going to just go along with what he says. There’s also just been a lot of hate crimes towards Jewish people, especially during COVID.
Lastly, the number of living Holocaust survivors is diminishing by the day. Gen Z is the last generation probably that is ever going to have the ability and the opportunity to speak with Holocaust survivors before they’re all gone. It’s important that we share this book now and then we educate people now before it’s too late.
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The post This 16-year-old turned her grandmother’s Holocaust survival story into a novel appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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The Jewish soul and Hasidic inspirations of Annie Dillard
The Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Annie Dillard, who died Sept, 15 at age 81, drew on Jewish inspiration past and present for her meditative books on humans and the deity, including the nature-imbued narrative Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.
Raised a Presbyterian, in young adulthood Dillard discovered Martin Buber’s Tales of the Hasidim, in which she found a kindred spirit among Hasidic rabbis who, according to legend, would turn somersaults and do cartwheels and flips in the synagogue before ritual acts such as reciting Kiddush, the blessing uttered to sanctify Shabbat and Jewish holidays; lighting Hanukkah candles; and weddings. As Dillard put it at Michigan’s Calvin College Festival of Faith & Writing in 1996, her introduction to Hasidism was through Buber’s books and she “really, really, really liked them.”
Herself exultant by temperament, fond of energetic dancing and sports, Dillard saw no contradiction between exuberance and serious consideration of moral and ethical questions. Indeed, she followed the Hasidic spiritual concept of Bitul ha-yesh (ego effacement) to become receptive to the divine by reading from a range of sources to find inspiration for her own books.
These included Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, whom she described to an interviewer in 1992 as “the great religious thinker” of the 20th century, and Simone Weil, the French philosopher. The latter two, “especially Heschel,” added Dillard, “have everything I need.”
What she needed as a writer was to fulfill her self-definition as a “Christian Hasid,” as she informed a reporter in the year 2000. The English literature maven Lori Kanitz has observed tyhat Dillard drew on Hasidic notions to better mull over nature and creation. Dillard agreed with the concept that humans assist God in redemption by making everyday physical objects and moments into something sacred or consecrated.
She favored the argument by the 16th century rabbi Isaac Luria that divine sparks trapped in the material world might be liberated through intense spiritual awareness. Especially in books such as 1999’s For the Time Being, she blended Yiddishkeit with heterodox Christian philosophers such as the Jesuit scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin to address questions about faith, suffering and individual existence.
The result was an emotionally fraught style, rich with biblical allusions. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek likens a combative domestic feline’s ensanguined paws to the “mark of Cain” and “blood sign of the Passover.” In this exalted, highly artful prose with Judaism as part of its vocabulary, the Quran is mentioned in the distressing context of animals devouring one another in nature, followed by the French Catholic thinker Blaise Pascal’s implication that after creation, God more or less abandoned humanity. Yet this existential doubt is calmed by two further citations from Albert Einstein to remind the reader that “subtle is the Lord, but malicious He is not” and “Nature hides her secret because of her essential loftiness, but not by means of ruse.” Bringing in Einstein, another example for Dillard alongside Abraham Joshua Heschel of the quasi-omniscient good grey Jew, shows her acute admiration for Jewish wisdom.
Characteristically, Dillard published in a 1998-99 issue of a University of Notre Dame publication for Catholic readers an essay insistent in its Yiddishkeit. The text begins by reminding readers of the execution of Rabbi Akiva by the Romans in the aftermath of the Bar Kokhba revolt. Unsparing of gory details, this account is followed by quotes from the Nobel-Prize-winning Holocaust poet Nelly Sachs, Gershom Scholem, Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, Rabbi Yehudah Aryeh Leib Alter, Rabbi Pinhas of Koretz, Rabbi Menachem Nochum Twersky, and a rare modern too, Rabbi Lawrence Kushner.
Blending nature with Jewish elements, Dillard recounts a trip to Lavi, a kibbutz in northern Israel near Tiberias, where she witnesses birds mating in mid-air. Juxtaposed with maxims by Christians, her narrative has an anthological aura, akin to that of Aldous Huxley’s The Perennial Philosophy (1945) which by contrast contains almost no direct passages from Jewish mystics.
Overall, Dillard kept in mind, as she suggested to one critic in 1999, that her goal was to persuade “the agnostic intellectual” that all spirituality need not be discarded by a discerning reader. That said, in some of Dillard’s books, the transitions between different traditions, from Sufism to Inuit beliefs, could appear contradictory.
But then as friends observed, Dillard herself could seem to be a walking contradiction; she was obsessed with nature, but also a lifelong chainsmoker. And although according to Lori Kanitz and others, her works were redolent of such venerable Jewish ideas as tsimtsum (divine contraction) and shevirat ha-kelim (shattering of the vessels), she likewise surrounded herself with a self-created Jewish mishpocheh of literati.
Dillard achieved the latter feat by energetically supporting modern American Jewish writing, lauding authors with more sheer enthusiasm than they may have been accustomed to receiving from fellow Jews. Drawn to high spirits and celebrants among living Jews, she was a fan of Louis D. Rubin’s Small Craft Advisory about shepping nachas from boats; she termed Rubin’s book a “moving account by a happy man.”
Part of appreciating happy Jews for Dillard was relishing Jewish humor with a highly developed sense of the absurd. She provided a blurb for a book by Jewish chef Peter Kaminsky about how to prepare decidedly un-kosher pork products, noting: “I love ham and I love this book.” She similarly kvelled at the inherent absurdity of describing how in 1982, the American Jewish Beat poet Allen Ginsberg was assigned the task of guiding a tour group in Disneyland composed of visiting Chinese communist authors. And she valued that a hybrid factual/fictional work by journalist Jake Silverstein was both “warm and funny.”
Dillard also persistently lavished serious praise on Jewish contemporaries such as the American visual artist and novelist Rosalyn Drexler for being “committed to a lifetime struggle for excellence.” Dillard deemed Fortune’s Daughter (1985) by Alice Hoffman “one of the best” American novels of the previous decade and in 2010 welcomed a debut story collection from Hester Kaplan as evidence of a “remarkable new writer.”
Unsurprisingly, Jewish writer friends of Dillard expressed gratitude for her enthusiasm for their efforts. The biographer Phyllis Rose’s Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages includes an acknowledgement to Dillard for “precious gifts of time, friendship, intelligence, and candor.” Jewish readers can likewise be grateful to Dillard for her characterful investment of time, friendship, intelligence, and candor in conveying elements of Yiddishkeit in serendipitous contexts.
The post The Jewish soul and Hasidic inspirations of Annie Dillard appeared first on The Forward.
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Robert Kraft pledged $2M to aid Palestinians amid Macklemore row. How will he do it?
(JTA) — Robert Kraft has found himself in an unusual position: nixing the rapper Macklemore’s appearance at a stadium he owns for what he said was hateful behavior — and then taking up the performer’s charity challenge.
Macklemore challenged the Jewish pro-Israel billionaire to make a donation in support of the Palestinians days after pressuring singer Ed Sheeran to drop Macklemore from his tour over the latter’s pro-Palestinian comments. Kraft responded by announcing that he would donate $2 million to “fight this humanitarian crisis” in the Middle East.
“I have dedicated much of my life to building bridges between all people,” Kraft wrote in a statement posted by Gillette Stadium, which he owns and where Sheeran and Macklemore had been scheduled to play. “I believe deeply that all lives are worth protecting.”
Kraft’s statement Wednesday came in response to challenges from both artists: a public call from Macklemore to match his own $1 million donation to a group of six pro-Palestinian organizations; and what Kraft described as private conversations with Sheeran to commit twice that amount to unspecified groups. Kraft said his own donation was meant to match Sheeran’s.
Kraft’s gift comes as the controversy has prompted questions about how pro-Israel Jews in positions of power choose to wield their influence to combat what they see as antisemitism. His pledge carries additional, politically fraught implications, as Jewish groups have been divided on whether, or how, to donate directly to Gaza relief efforts.
In his public comments, Kraft has insisted that he does not object to pro-Palestinian advocacy or aid as long as it does not cross the line into advocating for Hamas.
But where will Kraft donate? The New England Patriots owner didn’t specify in his public statement, and a representative didn’t immediately respond to questions from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
In Macklemore’s own post issuing the donation challenge, he said the $1 million he was giving constituted his entire net earnings from Sheeran’s tour. He named six beneficiaries: the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund, HEAL Palestine, Medical Aid for Palestinians, American Near East Refugee Aid, Gaza Soup Kitchen and UNRWA USA, a nonprofit supporting the United Nations Agency for Palestinian Refugees.
UNRWA itself has proven particularly contentious among the Jewish community. After an investigation revealed that agency members had participated in Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on Israel, the Trump administration led a successful effort to slash the agency’s funding.
In his posts, Kraft offered clues to where he has given in the past.
“I’d like the people who are speaking in support of the Palestinian people to know that for decades, I have supported efforts that create opportunity for Palestinians and have brought young Palestinians and Israelis together to build businesses, create jobs, and forge relationships,” he wrote on Wednesday. In an earlier statement, Kraft said he has “created athletic and entrepreneurial opportunities for Palestinians who I admire and respect.”
One well-known organization that fits Kraft’s description of bringing Palestinians and Israelis together, Seeds of Peace, has a documented relationship with the businessman. In 1994, the year after the peacebuilding initiative launched, Kraft hosted more than 100 teenagers from Israel, Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Egypt and Morocco at a Patriots game.
Seeds of Peace did not immediately respond to a JTA request for comment about whether Kraft would be giving to the group as part of his new pledge.
Kraft has also invested heavily in a push to bring American football to Israel via the Kraft Family Israel Football League. In that context, Palestinians have played for league teams — including for the Judean Rebels, a team based in an Israeli settlement in the occupied West Bank.
Steven Koltai, a Jewish onetime entrepreneurship liaison for former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and author of “Peace Through Entrepreneurship,” said he welcomed Kraft’s commitment.
“I would love to see, as a Jew who believes in the two-state solution and particularly in humanitarian relief to the millions of Gazans who are completely blameless, if we could show that side of who we are,” Koltai told JTA. “I think that he would be doing an incredible mitzvah for the whole Jewish world, especially the American Jewish community, if he could leverage his money towards something like this.”
Jeremy Burton, CEO of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Boston, told JTA that Kraft “deserves kudos for leaning in with his philanthropy.” Prior to the pledge, Burton had praised Kraft’s actions against Macklemore, saying in a statement that Kraft “drew a clear moral line in the sand about the demonization and offensive conduct that he will not allow in ‘his home’.”
“One can work to end Palestinian suffering without being antisemitic,” Burton wrote to JTA in a text Thursday.
Kraft has said he pressured Sheeran to drop Macklemore because he thought the latter’s conduct at a recent show, in which the rapper had accused Israel of genocide and broadcast footage from Columbia University’s encampments, crossed the line into “hate speech.” According to The Wall Street Journal, other NFL team owners had also voiced objections to Macklemore performing in their stadiums after witnessing one of his sets.
The Journal also reported that Kraft, in his conversation with Sheeran, recalled that Macklemore had performed in a costume with antisemitic signifiers in 2014. Sheeran, whose tours have grossed nearly $2 billion since 2008, and Kraft are friendly: The singer performed at Kraft’s 2022 wedding.
Backlash has been swift, with Sheeran distancing himself from the decision to drop Macklemore, and the singer’s other opening acts and supporting band leaving the tour in protest. Some of them named Kraft specifically in public comments. Figures including children’s entertainer Ms. Rachel and U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a New York Democrat, have also defended Macklemore, with Ocasio-Cortez additionally criticizing Kraft.
“When you see what Robert Kraft did to line up all of the stadiums to censor speech in that one specific way, it’s become clear that this is not just about one music artist or two music artists, but this is about how just a handful of stadium owners and the elite can prevent an entire massive issue, in this case, the genocide in Gaza,” the congresswoman told TMZ.
Others, including singer Pink and Barstool Sports mogul Dave Portnoy, have criticized Macklemore or defended Kraft’s decision.
Much of Kraft’s philanthropy has gone to fighting antisemitism and to Jewish organizations. He recently gave $10 million to Brandeis University to endow a new center for Jewish life at the school.
Koltai, who himself has not worked with Kraft, said it’s possible for Jewish donors to distribute money to Gaza through “vetted, kosher organizations” that are “clearly not Hamas.” He suggested that Kraft look beyond his past donations to peacebuilding and sports efforts in order to address the current need.
“Sewage, water, housing, medical care and child care are all much more important than a summer camp or a football team,” he said.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Robert Kraft pledged $2M to aid Palestinians amid Macklemore row. How will he do it? appeared first on The Forward.
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Hundreds of Michigan Jews pledge to vote for Abdul El-Sayed
(JTA) — ANN ARBOR – More than 600 Michigan Jews have signed a new open letter pledging to vote for Abdul El-Sayed for U.S. Senate, seeking to grow the Democratic candidate’s rocky Jewish support in what is expected to be a close and pivotal election.
The coalition, “Michigan Jews for Democracy,” includes several liberal and progressive Jewish figures in the state, though they signed in personal capacities. Signatories include father and son former U.S. Reps. Sander and Andy Levin, progressive attorney general nominee Eli Savit, Michigan Democratic Jewish Caucus chair Decky Alexander, Detroit Jews for Justice executive director Lisa Tencer and former “Uncommitted” organizer Eleanor Gamalski.
“Some of us are enthusiastic supporters of El-Sayed,” the open letter reads. “Some of us have reservations: there are disagreements with El-Sayed on important issues, including aspects of his approach to Israel and the language used by some of his allies.”
The letter continues, “We understand that a vote is not a valentine; it’s a strategic chess move.”
El-Sayed’s campaign promoted the letter Thursday morning.
Jewish clergy who signed include Rabbi Alana Alpert of the Reconstructionist Congregation T’chiyah in Ferndale; Rabbi Nate DeGroot, who serves congregations in Jackson and Flint and directs the Shalom Center; and retired Cantor Annie Rose of Reform Temple Beth Emeth in Ann Arbor. Other notable signers include University of Michigan Jewish Studies professor Deborah Moore and Danny Fenster, the Jewish journalist who was imprisoned in Myanmar for five months in 2021.
El-Sayed has sought to mend relations with Jewish voters in the state in recent months, though his opposition to a two-state solution in Israel, along with past controversies involving anti-Israel streamer Hasan Piker and his response to the attack on the Detroit-area Temple Israel, have rendered his candidacy polarizing to the community. Recently El-Sayed held an unpublicized meeting with rabbis at Temple Israel, weeks after apologizing for his earlier remarks in which he appeared to equivocate about condemning the March attack, according to a report in Jewish Insider.
The new letter in favor of El-Sayed also comes in contrast to other Jewish open letters in the state. One pledging to vote for his GOP opponent, former U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers, has collected 478 names since launching in August. Another, urging El-Sayed to respond to Jewish “non-negotiables” including “Jewish sovereignty in Israel,” has been promoted by several rabbis in the state.
National Democrats see retaining Michigan’s Senate seat as essential to their hopes of retaking the chamber this fall and instituting checks on President Donald Trump. The Michigan Democratic Jewish Caucus has not endorsed El-Sayed, despite its chair’s presence on the new letter. The Jewish Democratic Council of America, whose CEO Halie Soifer is a Michigan native, has also not endorsed him, telling Jewish Insider this week that the organization does “not endorse all Democrats.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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