The Right to Happiness by Helen Schary Motro
Buy this book at Amazon or for Kindle or at Bookshop
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
