Overview

“I spent the first three years of my life unaware of the disaster that had befallen my family.” Annette Libeskind Berkovits writes: “I was shaped by the aftermath of the Holocaust...I adapted...grew a protective shield for self-preservation, then put on a smile and moved forward to meet the world on my own terms.” She was born in exile among the red poppy-strewn foothills of the Himalayan Mountains and raised in Soviet Kyrgyzstan. Annette and her parents returned via cattle train to Poland only to discover that the Nazis had murdered almost their entire extended family and reduced their homes to rubble. After her parents obtained exit visas from the Soviet authorities, she became a teenage immigrant to two different countries in the space of two years. Israel, a country barely ten years old - rough, sweet, vibrant, with its brilliant sky and azure sea - was like stepping into Technicolor after Poland’s dreary grays. Annette fell in love with it. But just two years later Annette’s life was upended again when the family was driven to emigrate to America. Leaving the blue of Israel behind Annette was greeted by the green patina of the Statue of Liberty as the ship reached New York harbor. Her father and an Auschwitz survivor aunt welcomed the family with excitement, but many obstacles lay ahead. The American immigrant experience is realized here from a perspective of a young girl. New languages, customs, and cultures, learned at lightning speed while mastering the normal angst of adolescence, make this a vivid and immersive memoir, rich with the detail of everyday life. Annette graduated from one of the most selective public high schools in America and later became an internationally respected wildlife conservation educator and a writer of memoir, poetry, and historical fiction. Her brother, Daniel Libeskind, the internationally renowned architect, is very much a part of her story.

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Reviews

Aftermath is a gorgeous bouquet of a book, chronicling Berkovits' family's journey from Soviet Kyrgyzstan to Poland in the wake of World War II and the Holocaust, their subsequent sojourn in Israel and, finally, their gamble on building a new life for themselves in the United States. It is both a touching coming-of-age memoir and an inspirational immigrant story, an absolute pleasure to read. -Andrew Nagorski, award-winning author, journalist and former foreign correspondent, director of an international affairs think tank and editor for Newsweek. Author of Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power; The Nazi Hunters; and 1941: The Year Germany Lost the War. Berkovits is sensitive to what it feels like to carry the burdens of history on the slim shoulders of childhood; to the dislocation and identity confusion of the immigrant experience; and to the ways in which a child absorbs parental trauma. Most of all, the book is a joyful celebration of the adaptability and resilience of childhood. -Rabbi Rena Blumenthal, psychologist in New York City and Jerusalem; author of The Book of Israela; Former Assistant Director, Office of Religious & Spiritual Life at Vassar College and Board member of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association. In her charming and inspiring memoir, Annette Libeskind Berkovits, manages to combine terror, deprivation, desperation, hope, romance, and humor into an artful story of wandering, love, loss, and ultimately triumph. Berkovits' personal journey...mirrors the awesome and awful saga of 20th-century Jews. Berkovits draws the reader deeply into her sad, wounded, but loving family, even as she presents the full range of the modern Jewish experience from tragic loss to redemption and healing. -Rabbi Phil Graubart, Judaica Director at the San Diego Jewish Academy, author of ten books, the latest being Women and God. Aftermath is one of those necessary books that provides a rare account of the lives of Holocaust survivors after the war. Most survivors did not repatriate, but the Libeskind family did for some post-war years. It poignantly depicts how this Jewish family negotiated the residual antisemitism in Poland as it tried to re-establish itself. An impossible feat, the family then followed the heart-rending nomadic path of so many survivors, moving from place to place until almost out of exhaustion, they settled in the U.S. -Ellen G. Friedman, PhD., Professor of English and Women's & Gender Studies, The College of New Jersey; Coordinator of the Holocaust and Genocide Studies Program; author of The Seven, a Family Holocaust Story. With characters you genuinely care about, exotic locales, and edge-of-your-seat tension, Aftermath is the best memoir I've read in years. -Barbara Donsky, EdD, International Best-Selling author of Missing Mother and Veronica's Grave: A Daughter's Memoir. Aftermath is both a personal and universal immigrant survival story of striving for the American Dream, but with an important subplot. Before feminism was a glimmer in Gloria Steinem's eye, there were girls and women like Berkovits and her mother. Gritty, intelligent, iron-willed survivors who, against all odds, made the best of the worst possible situations, stitching together a new American life. -Alan Sharavsky, Author of Boarding School Bastard, A Memoir: Life in an Orphanage for Fatherless Boys

Author Information

Annette Libeskind Berkovits (www.annetteberkovits.com) was born in Kyrgyzstan and grew up in postwar Poland and the fledgling state of Israel before coming to America at age sixteen. In her three-decade career with the Wildlife Conservation Society in New York, she spearheaded the institution’s nationwide and worldwide science education programs. Her achievements include the first-ever agreement to bring environmental education to China’s schools. The National Science Foundation has recognized her outstanding leadership in the field. Now retired, she is pursuing her life-long love of writing. Her stories and poems have appeared in Silk Road Review: a Literary Crossroads; Persimmon Tree and in American Gothic: a New Chamber Opera. Her first memoir, In the Unlikeliest of Places, a story of her remarkable father’s survival, was published by Wilfrid Laurier University Press in September 2014. Berkovits has completed two other non-fiction manuscripts and is working on a poetry collection as well as a novel.

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