The Right to Happiness by Helen Schary Motro
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After all they went through. Stories
New Jewish Fiction
Innovative short stories explore echoes of the Holocaust upon survivors and their children, lessons of post-trauma for the 21st century.
In eleven compelling stories inheritors of the Holocaust strive to seize whatever life has left to them.
International award-winning author Helen Schary Motro’s intimate and poignant fiction paints the panorama of their emotional canvas: renewal as well as trauma, insight as well as sorrow, ingenuity as well as loss. Some fail to recover, while others do all to achieve solace.
- Unable to pierce her parents’ wall of hidden mourning, a child dreams her perished grandparents back to life.
- A Yiddish actor turns radio host after the war – until his language becomes obsolete. Can he reinvent himself yet again?
- Hoarding discarded cigarette butts from her parents’ ashtrays, a girl smokes in secret to mimic the grandmother who starved in the ghetto.
- A reluctant piano student learns that master classes teach more than concertos.
- A survivors’ daughter yearns to live her American dream at the Thanksgiving Day Parade, but the subway from Brooklyn takes her farther away.
- Facing Israel’s imminent annihilation an assimilated survivor discovers what she really cares about.
Readers will cry at their pain, will smile with recognition – may even laugh – along with Motro’s moving survivors and their children as the past continues to reverberate upon them.
Year first published: 2024