Overview

The only artifact from my family's world before the onset of World War II is a pair of ""raveled, stained, scored, and torn"" napkins. These frayed ""white napkins with blue borders"" were ""given to my mother by her mother on the platform of a train station in 1939."" My parents traveled from that platform in Nowy Dwor Mazowiecki, Poland, to Bialystok to Siberia to Uzbekistan, saving their lives and losing everything else. Sally and Morris Michlewitz grew up in the newly independent Poland during the interwar period. They experienced the building of a newly defined nation. They witnessed the destruction and conquest of that nation in September 1939. Sally survived the Blitz in Warsaw. Morris, as a Polish infantryman, survived the failed defense of the city. During the next decade, they saw the world falling apart in small and large ways. The narrative ends in Brooklyn, New York in 1975. Frayed Lives paints the panorama of a family record which stretches across thousands of miles. It retells family history and connects it to the stories of other people surviving those times and places. It frames these stories with the history of record presented by scholars. It carefully depicts the desperation of refugees of war.

Full Product Details

9781539988700

Table of Contents

Reviews

Author Information

Debra Michlewitz grew up as a ""stranger in a strange land,"" as a first generation American in a Brooklyn household cobbled together from fragments surviving the Holocaust. Her truncated family, only mother, father, and brother, embraced all things American: language, education, custom, and ambition. Her New York City public school education equipped her for a rewarding 39 year career as a New York City public high school English / Humanities teacher, winning recognition from Poet's House, Univision, and the New York State Senate. She honed her narrative skills by writing ""thousands"" of riveting college recommendations for gifted students seeking admission to elite colleges. She earned a B.A. in English with Honors in Writing and a M.A. in 18th Century English Literature from Brooklyn College and a M.L.S. from Queens College. Her master's thesis, In the Eye of the Beholder, explored Laurence Sterne's depiction of memory in Tristram Shandy, good preparation for the writing of Frayed Lives. Currently Debra Michlewitz is a consultant for the NYC Department of Education and a school groups docent at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She lives in Queens with her husband Dennis Lebwohl and often vacations at a family summer home in Falmouth, Massachusetts.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available