The daughter of Holocaust survivors, Elizabeth Wajnberg was born in postwar Poland. Evoking the past from the present, she gathers her family's history as it moves from the prewar years through the war to their arrival in Montreal. She traces through their own voices the memories that echo and have shaped their lives to present a portrait of a family whose bonds were both soldered and sundered by their wartime experiences. The people in this book are living sheymes - fragments of a holy book that are not to be discarded when old, but buried in consecrated ground. While embodying the world they have lost and the remnants that they carried with them, Wajnberg follows her family through their last decades. As her parents age and the author becomes their active and anxious caregiver, the book changes its perspective to accent the present - now the scene of trauma - when her parents join another demeaned group. Knowing their history, she senses that society turns away from the elderly the same way it looks away from the details of the Holocaust. Rich with humour and Yiddish idioms, Sheymes is a compelling and beautifully written memoir. In its illumination of the legacy of the Holocaust and the universal aspect of Jewish suffering, it resonates far beyond her family.
Authors
- Control Number Identifier
- CaOOCEL
- Date published
- 2014.
- Description conventions
- rda
- Dewey Decimal Classification Number
- 971.4/270049240092
- Dewey Decimal Edition Number
- 23
- Distributor
- Canadian Electronic Library (Firm),
- General Note
- Some text in Yiddish Issued as part of the desLibris books collection
- Geographic Area Code
- n-cn-qu
- ISBN
- 9780773596955 9780773544598
- Modifying agency
- CaBNVSL
- Original cataloging agency
- CaOONL
- Physical Description | Extent
- 1 electronic text (xiii, 258 pages, 16 pages of plates)
- Published in
- Ottawa, Ontario
- Publisher or Distributor Number
- CaOOCEL
- Rights
- Access restricted to authorized users and institutions
- System Control Number
- (CaBNVSL)slc00235194 (OCoLC)895193158 (CaOOCEL)447727
- System Details Note
- Mode of access: World Wide Web
- Transcribing agency
- CaOONL
Table of Contents
- Cover 1
- Half-title 2
- Title 4
- Copyright 5
- Dedication 6
- Contents 8
- Introduction 10
- A Note on the Transliteration of Yiddish 12
- 1 My Father’s Visit, 1983 34
- 2 Paris Is the Most Beautiful City in the World 39
- 3 Wood 54
- 4 The Forest of Beech Trees 73
- 5 Immigrants 86
- 6 “Send Away the Mother Bird” 107
- 7 My Sister’s Visit, Montreal, 1980 113
- 8 Poppyseed Cake 127
- 9 “He Will Turn the Children toward the Parents,” 1990 139
- 10 The Other Elizabeth 168
- 11 Shevirah (Shattering), November 1993 187
- 12 It’s Lively in the Shtetl, December 1993 197
- 13 Mame-Loshen (Mother Tongue), 1995 208
- 14 April 1996 222
- 15 “Honour Thy Father and Mother,” June 1996 231
- 16 Blindsight, 2000 243
- 17 Spring 1997 254
- 18 Rachamim (Compassion), 1997 261
- Epilogue: Yizkor 279
- Dertsaylung fun a geratevete/Account of a Rescued Person by Chaja Zylberberg Wajnberg 280
- Until the Outbreak of the War 280
- Bitter Days for the Jews of Demblin 281
- The Roundup 283
- I Jumped through the Window 283
- Good People Help Us 285
- Acknowledgments 288
