Overview

"""A sweeping and nuanced story of living with the effects of trauma."" - Kirkus Review Award-winning Painful Joy represents five years of intensive research in the US, Poland, Sweden, Israel and Germany, seeking to unearth the real life stories of Sam and Frieda Friedman in order to discover their roots, recreate their lives and times and uncover both their remarkable journeys and painful secrets. Part memoir, part genealogical mystery and part history, the book is an absorbing, heartwarming and, at times, heartbreaking tale as readers accompany the author on his extraordinary exploration of the complicated relationship between two Holocaust survivors who meet in Sweden after their liberation, and experience the ""painful joy"" of a love too often touched by death."

Full Product Details

Author:   Max J. Friedman
Publisher:   Amsterdam Publishers
Imprint:   Amsterdam Publishers
Dimensions:   Width: 15.20cm , Height: 2.40cm , Length: 22.90cm
Weight:   0.553kg
ISBN:  

9789493231825

ISBN 10:   9493231828
Pages:   378
Publication Date:   26 April 2022
Audience:   General/trade ,  General
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Available To Order  
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Table of Contents

"Preface PART I Questioning Survival Introduction PART II The Prewar Years: Szlama Frydman Żarnowiec and Będzin Dąbrowa Górnicza PART III The War Years: Szlama Finally, A Father's Tale Będzin The Slave Labor Camps Bunzlau The Death March and Bergen-Belsen PART IV The Prewar Years: Frimet Entenberg Sieniawa Refugees from War Settling in Kraków Frimet's Kraków Home: Jozefa 12 PART V The War Years: Frimet Friedmann Schindler's List Opens My Eyes Deportations The Kraków Ghetto Płaszów and Auschwitz Bergen-Belsen Before Leaving Poland PART VI The Postwar Years: Sweden Searching for Life after Death A New Kind of Camp Szlama: Alone Frieda: Alone Coming Together PART VII In the USA The Coney Island Years Brighton Beach Family Memories Sam and Frieda: By Themselves Again PART VIII A Final Stop: Mobile, Alabama Alzheimer's Changes Everything ""I Just Don't Know Why"" Our Last Walk PART IX An Enduring Legacy Psychological Effects of the Holocaust through the Generations PART X Coming Home Back to Sweden Love That Death Has Touched Acknowledgments Bibliography About The Author Notes Suggested Further Reading"

Reviews

Max Friedman's Painful Joy dutifully fulfills the biblical mandate to honor one's father and mother. Sensitively and lovingly written, compelling and at times poetic, it reminds us all that the tragedy of the Holocaust lies not in grand historical events, political or military, but in the broken lives of real human beings, both those who did not survive and those who did, and, all-too-often, communicated that brokenness to their children and grandchildren. Frieda and Sam Friedman survived, made their way into the world of the foreign land of the United States, birthed two children, and bequeathed to them - and us - the power not only of love despite all, but perseverance and resilience as well. Kol hakavod! [Hebrew for A job well done! ] - Rabbi Dr. Steven Leonard Jacobs is Professor of Religious Studies and Emeritus Aronov Endowed Chair of Judaic Studies at The University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa Max opens a door for us to enter a shared world; a world touched by his family's pain, longing, love, sorrow and hope. His gentle, respectful and caring writing style will leave a mark upon you after you close the book for the last time - inviting you to open the door again. You will re-open this book! - Rabbi Steven Silberman, Congregation Ahavas Chesed, Mobile, AL Painful Joy, A Holocaust Family Memoir is dedicated to and in memory of Salomon and Frieda Friedman, cherished parents of Max. The reader feels the love, appreciation and respect the author holds for his parents as he grapples with the incomprehensible acts of inhumanity they endured and endeavors to understand the indelible mark the Holocaust left upon them and the trauma he inherited through their DNA and as the child of Holocaust survivors. Factual content, precise descriptions of environs, explanations of customs and mores, definitions of non-English words as well as personal musings are beautifully woven within the memoir. Friedman's command of the English language is superb, and the reader will be immersed in the narrative, almost able to utilize one's senses to hear, see, smell and touch that which is described in this well-crafted memoir. The reader becomes acquainted with the richness of his parents' and grandparents' lives and the Jewish communities in which they lived. Information about the villages and cities is presented to the reader through meticulous research, bringing us back as far as the 13th century so that we can understand more fully how these communities evolved. We reflect how pain and hardship define our very being, as does love. Like Salomon and Frieda, we can feel joy after knowing sorrow. - Millie Jasper is Executive Director, Holocaust & Human Rights Education Center, White Plains, NY

"""A journalist, editor, and author tells the stories of his parents, both Holocaust survivors, in a debut memoir. How do the experiences of one's parents affect one's own life? Friedman attempts to answer this question while recounting the journeys of his father and mother, Salomon and Frieda Friedman, who made it through imprisonment in Nazi concentration camps and started new lives with each other after World War II. They lived with the scars of their experiences in often different ways, struggling with the tension between remembering and forgetting. This sweeping story covers their entire lives, from their youths in prewar Eastern Europe to their deaths in old age from Alzheimer's disease, in Salomon's case, and lung disease, in Frieda's. This book is also Friedman's own story as a child of these survivors and an account of his desire to understand and document their lives for future generations. In this biography, he also notes that both parents had spouses and children who died before they met each other and started a new family. They experienced many horrors in the camps; Frieda had memories of Nazi Amon Göth (played by Ralph Fiennes in the acclaimed film Schindler's List), who casually shot people in the camp from his bedroom window. Friedman's parents met in a recovery camp in Sweden after the war. The author and his sister were born in that country, and the family later resettled in the United States, spending most of their lives in Brooklyn, New York; Friedman's parents relocated to Mobile, Alabama, in old age. The book concludes with the author's account of his own travel to Sweden as an adult to learn more about his parents' story and meet people who helped them. The book includes an appendix on the long-term psychological effects of survivorship and suggested further reading. Friedman's work is full of history regarding Jewish life in Eastern Europe before the Second World War, and some of it is understandably difficult to read. Many readers may be unfamiliar with ""aliens' camps,"" intended for recovery and located in hotels, dorms, and barracks in Sweden; the author details this aspect of the survivor experience, which is less commonly documented. The book is also an intensely personal account of two temperamentally mismatched people bound together by a common experience of survival. Friedman effectively emphasizes his parents' different and often clashing ways of coping that sometimes made their marriage fraught with tension, but their pasts held them together more than they pushed them apart. The book is a thoughtful and complex look at the long-term effects of the Holocaust, showing the deleterious effects of the experience on extended families as well as the resilience of its survivors. However, the book reflects less deeply on the fact that the author's parents both lost families prior to their marriage. The book's length, at more than 350 pages, may be off-putting to some readers, but its engaging readability makes up for it. A sweeping and nuanced story of living with the effects of trauma."" - Kirkus Reviews"

Author Information

"Life often interferes with our dreams. Fifty years ago, I was certain that I would spend my working life at a newspaper or magazine, covering Japan in some way, while living in a brownstone in Manhattan. Back then, I also didn’t give much thought to having children or grandchildren, what that would mean or how that would feel. Still, I was sure that I would marry someone beautiful and wonderful. At least I got one thing right early on. At Columbia, I met Jennifer, who was at Barnard and sat next to me in Comedy class. We married, and she remains the love of my life. The brownstone transformed into a house in Larchmont, NY, where we raised accomplished and warm-hearted twin boys, Eric and Noah. And we eventually would discover the pure joys (and challenges) of having grandchildren. As for Asia, I found my language skills wanting, so that ambition waned. Ironically though, Noah fell in love with China, married a Chinese woman and they and our grandkids, Jacob and Emma, live in Shanghai, where he does strategy for a U.S. medical device company. After visiting there too many times, I admit to having lost my fascination with many things Asian: mostly we just miss our grandkids and hate jetlag. Covid has made things that much more difficult on so many levels. Eric meanwhile lives in D.C. and focuses on human rights and health equity issues at Georgetown Law. As for journalism, I did go to Berkeley and got a master’s, but became impatient with journalism as a profession. So I turned in my press pass while freelancing features and book reviews and sampling other writing jobs. Ultimately I discovered a satisfying career in writing and editing – but one with more regular hours, time for family and better pay. I worked for five years at WNET/13 (PBS) as a publicist for Bill Moyers' Journal and other programs, and then was responsible for editorial projects at the station. I spent the next 20 years learning about pharmaceuticals and writing about patients and scientists as head of communications at Bristol-Myers Squibb. Corporate life can have its ups and downs. So when they told me to fire half my staff, I asked to be put on that list as well. On my own ever since 2002, I’ve been writing and editing for dozens of clients – especially speeches and feature articles for journals -- as well as spending four years completing two memoirs, one of Charles A. Heimbold, Jr., a retired pharmaceutical company CEO (""A Life Lived Full,"" 2015) and the other of his wife, Monika Heimbold, a retired clinical social worker and a co-founder with Queen Silvia of Sweden of the World Childhood Foundation that focuses on child trafficking and exploitation (""Designing a Life,"" 2016). Most recently, I have spent five years researching and writing ""Painful Joy"" (Amsterdam Publishers, 2022), part memoir, part biography, part genealogical mystery, a story focused primarily on my parents, Polish Holocaust survivors who lost everyone in their families during the war, survived the camps and then met and married in Sweden. My sister and I were born there. We emigrated in 1952 to the U.S. Like so many other survivors, they spoke very little about their past, though the horrors they survived were always apparent. So I decided to finally find out more, about who they once were and what they might have become, and about their survival and its after effects. It turned out that their story was more complicated, more compelling, more heartwarming and heartbreaking than I ever imagined. And as to what they told us, I discovered that they were mostly reimaginings of their complicated realities. And I came to understand better the effects of their survival on my own existence - and indeed on broader themes that their lives and journeys reflected. The moral of this tale? I suppose when you grow up in Coney Island, a block from the ocean, you get used to looking out onto vast horizons of sea and sky. But what you still can’t see is the shape of the future."

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