Bending Toward The Sun / Review

Aurthor, Leslie Gilbert-Lurie

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Prologue

by Leslie Gilbert-Lurie

Author of Bending Toward the Sun: A Mother and Daughter Memoir


"Mommy, I was afraid that you died."
"I didn't die. Sleeping. I was sleeping." Holding my cell phone, I  
propped myself up on the pillow and regained my bearings. I was in an  
elegant hotel room in Washington, D.C. Judging from the burning  
sensation in my eyes, I had not been asleep for long.
"I was so worried when you didn't answer the phone." My daughter's  
small voice trembled.

"Not until the fourth ring."
Her sadness and the demands I knew were soon to follow sent blood  
rushing to my temples. "Mikaela, I'm fine."

"I can't stay here, Mommy."
I took a deep breath and thought fast. My voice softened. "I just  
dropped you off a few hours ago. We talked about the fact that the  
first night might be an adjustment. What did you do this evening?"
"Nothing. I didn't eat. I just cried."

She was in Bethesda, about twenty minutes away. "Honey, it was a big  
honor to be chosen for this leadership conference. You were so excited  
about going, you have a good friend there, you'll learn all about  
government, and -- "

"Mommy, please! Take me home! I'm only eleven years old, and I'm not  
ready for this. Please."
"Mikaela, you are ready. You'll be so proud of yourself for sticking  <
br />it out. What do you want to bet you'll love it there by the end of the  
five days?"

She was sobbing now. "I won't. I hate it! I don't even feel like  
myself here. I'm hiding in the bathroom so I don't wake up my  
roommates, worrying that you're going to die!"
"I'm not going to die. Not for fifty more years at least."
"You don't know that for sure."

I was afraid she would say that. "You're right, I don't. But I eat  
healthy foods, I exercise, I wear sunscreen, and I don't drink and  
drive, so I should live for a very long time, right?"

"Can you at least come over here to give me a hug goodnight?"

It's a trap. She'll never let me leave without her. If I had just  
flown out of town this afternoon, we would not be having this  
negotiation. "It won't help, sweetie. You'll just miss me more if you  
see me." By now my head was aching.

"I won't. I swear."

I was not surprised by her determination, but I held firm. "No."
"You just don't understand," she said angrily.
"Yes, I do." I did understand. She was in pain, a kind with which I  
was all too familiar, and I could alleviate her anxiety just by  jumping into a taxi. 

But it would be a mistake. Even though she had  
always been apprehensive about being away from me, she had made  
significant strides as of late. She'd been nervous about a recent two- 
night class trip to20northern California, but had gone anyway and had  
ended up having a great time. I was certain that this new adventure  
would also surprise her, and provide further evidence that she could  
survive without me. After all, she was a survivor. She came by that  
honestly.

I grew up in 1960s suburban Los Angeles, part of a family who was  
living the American Dream. My parents raised my siblings and me in a  
friendly, safe, and well-kept community. Every home on the block and

every kid looked more or less the same, with a smattering of ethnic  
diversity to break the monotony. I loved sports, especially baseball,  
made friends easily enough, and was a good student. My family ate  
dinner together nearly every night and took occasional vacations, just  
like the other families we knew.

Yet some things were different in our family. My mother believed that  
I could be president of the United States, but she hoped I could make  
the leap to high office directly from my cozy bedroom, where she knew  
I was safe. My mother didn't like me to smile at strangers, play  
outside after dusk, visit friends whose parents weren't nurturing  
enough, and most importantly, be far away from her. While I bristled  
at these restrictions, I lived by them. I knew that my mother's fears  
were birthed by tragedy. She carried wounds whose power I could never  
comprehend.

I think of my mother as a modern-day Anne Frank. Both my mother and  
Anne Frank spent two years in hiding during the Holocaust, while the  
Nazis searched for them. Both were forced to live in an attic with  
their families, which was highly unusual. Jewish children were rarely  
able to hide with their families during the Holocaust, and typically,  
hidden Jews spent only a short time in any one place. My mother and  
Anne Frank both were kept alive, in large part, because of the courage  
and kindness of gentile friends. In my mother's case, a Polish farmer  
and his wife sheltered a bewildered five-year-old girl and fourteen  
members of her family, including an infant.

There were many similarities between my mother and Anne Frank. But my  
mother was the only one fortunate enough to survive. For decades,  
readers have wondered what Anne Frank might have become, had she  
survived. My mother's coming-of-age story may provide some indirect  
insight, as well as a glimpse of the long-term impact of the Holocaust  
on the children who were directly affected by it.

I've begun this book with my mother's story. Her memories from early  
childhood are unusually detailed, although surely idealized at times.  
I've taken some creative liberties in reconstructing dialogue, but  
always with an eye toward accurately reflecting the spirit of the  
conversations my mother recalled, and the manner in which she  
remembered family members speaking to one another. In addition to  
relying solely on the memory of my mother, I was also able to  
interview six other relatives who hid with her in the attic.

I will never forget the evening my mother and I spent in the living  
room of my mother's first cousin Sally. Four women, all in their  
sixties, who had hidden together in an attic as young children, a half  
century earlier, were sharing recollections. Given how rare it was for  
children to survive the Holocaust, such a family reunion was highly  
unusual. And then there was my mother's eighty-six-year old uncle,  
Max. He had never wanted to share his memories, but that evening, he  
found himself leading the discussion.

Where most Holocaust narratives conclude, this one gathers momentum.  
Some of my mother's most unsettling recollections stemmed from the 

period right after Germany surrendered to Allied forces during World  
War II. My mother's story illuminates the fallout of the Holocaust as  
her family wandered throughout Europe for five heartbreaking years  
before coming to America. Her spirit, deep faith, and endurance  
against all odds provide powerful -- and inspiring -- evidence of the  
resilience of the human spirit.

In the second and third parts of this book, my mother's story becomes  
our joint account, narrated in my voice, and eventually includes my  
daughter, Mikaela. The stories of three generations merge in these  
pages, just as our hopes and dreams have so often in my life. Although  
my mother's and my experiences bear virtually no similarity, it is in  
the overlapping shadows that we find common ground. My mother's  
traumas became my nightmares. Not a day went by in balmy Los Angeles  
that I didn't feel lashed by what she suffered through in Poland  
during the war. On the other hand, my mother's hopes and aspirations  
also sowed the seeds for my ambition and my achievements.

Over countless breakfasts as a child I asked my mother the same  
questions about her past -- the few that I knew to ask. What was it  
like to wake up that morning and see tanks outside your house? What  
did you eat inside the attic? Did you have meals with your mommy and  
daddy when you were hiding? If the answers could ever make sense to  
me, I believed, my world would finally feel safe. After traveling back  
to Poland to meet the family who hid my mother, to sit in the attic  
where her childhood disappeared like an ice cube on a feverish brow,  
and then spending nearly a decade writing this book, I finally began  
to understand where my mother came from and how her experiences  
transformed her. I had to research further, however, to see just how  
the trauma of my mother's past had been transmitted to me, and then to  
my children.

My husband and I had always encouraged our children to be adventurous.  
I worked vigilantly to prevent my fears from interfering with the  
messages I communicated to them. Even my daughter, who was more  
tentative than my son and stepson about separating from me, had always  
cheerfully rebounded as soon as we were reunited. I was surprised,  
therefore, when her anxiety did not diminish after she returned home  
from her leade
rship trip to Washington, D.C.

There was something particularly resilient about the strain of fear  
Mikaela seemed to have inherited. I came to see that while scientists  
had found a way to prevent the virulent AIDS virus from passing, in  
utero, from mother to daughter, no such barrier had yet been  
discovered to prevent the effects of trauma from being transmitted  
across generations. I learned that as a result of trauma passing from  
one generation to the next, it was not unusual to find children of  
Holocaust survivors, or the "Second Generation," as we came to be  
known, weighed down by feelings of loss, guilt, and anxiety, and  
trapped in a dynamic of mutual devotion and overprotection between  
parent and child. And clearly the fallout extended to a third  
generation. Like me, Mikaela, too, seemed to be trapped in the vortex  
of a tragedy that had taken place a half century before she was born.

As for exactly how such trauma might be 

transferred from one generation to the next, researchers have proposed 

a variety of theories. Psychoanalytic approaches suggest that emotions that  
couldn't be consciously dealt with by Holocaust 

urvivors themselves  have been passed down to their children. Sociological

theories focus on the connection between a survivor's beliefs and fears and their  
child-rearing practices. Other researchers have looked to the family  
unit as a whole to ascertain the impact of the Holocaust survivors'  
experience on their children. They found, for example, that in tightly  
knit survivor families, attempts by children to establish boundaries  
are often viewed as a threat to the family's unity.

Finally, other researchers have proposed that memories of fear can  
actually be carried across generations through biochemistry. Children  
of Holocaust survivors have been found to have lower than average  
levels of the stress hormone cortisol, just like their traumatized  
parents. They also are more likely than average to suffer from  
post traumatic stress disorder when exposed to a traumatic event, and  
more likely to view a non-life-threatening event, such as illness or  
separation from a loved one, as traumatic. This approach helps explain  
why children growing up in the same household but with different  
combinations of genes could be affected so differently by a parent's  
trauma -- why I was more fearful of leaving home than my sister, 

why  my daughter was more fearful of separation than my son. These various  
theories regarding the intergenerational transmission of posttraumatic  
stress left me hopeful that we might find new ways to lessen its most  
harmful effects.

For my mother, at seventy years old, completing this book was  
bittersweet. Just after she had stoically finished taking me through  
her life, barely flinching at the most intimate, disturbing details,  
she plunged into a deep depression. I was left wondering if this  
project had been a mistake. Thankfully, my mother recovered, and her  
optimism and hunger for adventure returned. She reminded me that her  
primary motivation for creating this memoir had never been to help her  
cope. This book was intended to help others better understand the  
Holocaust and its impact, and hopefully to also shed light on the  
potential complications resulting from other tragedies taking place  
today, around the world. This book was written with the hope that  
children and grandchildren of trauma survivors -- as well as others  
facing their own challenges -- might find inspiration in my mother's  
courageous story.

Last summer, I agreed to teach a course on the Holocaust at my son  
Gabriel's high school. One of the teachers at the school, a friend who  
had grown up in Sri Lanka, came to our house for dinner before the  
semester began. Between margaritas and20slices of homemade pizza, he  
casually asked me, in his perfect Oxford-bred English accent, if I  
knew the Latin root of the word holocaust. "Some of my students will  
be in your course, and they'll quiz you on this right 

off the bat," he explained.

I searched my memory. In the past decade I had read scores of books  
and viewed countless documentaries on the Holocaust. I knew dates of  
Allied bombings, numbers of victims at each camp, and the names of  
heroes, villains, and those in between. I was certain I had come  
across the origins of the word along the way, but it escaped me. If I  
confessed ignorance, my erudite Sri Lankan friend, who had left behind  
a successful investment banking career, would be convinced that his  
Oxford education was superior to my American one. For the sake of the  
team, I took a guess. I deduced that holo sounded like whole, and that  
caust had to do with destruction.

"Something like total destruction?" I asked.

"Close."

Yes, I thought."But not quite." He told me that holocaust, in Latin, means "burned  
offerings." It stems from the Greek words holo (which as I had guessed  
did mean "whole") and caust("burned"). In ancient times, the priests  
of the Hebrew Temple in Jerusalem would offer animal sacrifices to God.

Holocaustum, in biblical Latin, referred to those offerings to God that were 

burned in their entirety at the altar, leaving no meat  
for consumption. Centuries later in the United States, the crematoria  
of Auschwitz brought the word holocaustto mind. It became synonymous  
with the destruction of European Jews by the Germans.

Thinking about that ancient definition, I realized it was not an  
entirely accurate description of what took place during World War II.  
The fire of hate that the Nazis lit did not consume everything. The  
earth was scorched, but from the blackened ground new seeds sprouted.  
Their genes had been affected by the intensity of the heat, but grow  
they did, and thrive they would, as my mother would put it, "bending  
toward the sun." This book is for those whose hopes have been dashed,  
or burned beyond recognition. It is for those who may have been born  
too late to witness the most traumatic event they would ever  
experience. And it is for those who are interested in exploring the  
blurry lines between good and evil, hope and despair, and mothers and  
daughters. I is evidence that despite the depth of pain and horror we  
may experience, the will of the human spirit is irrepressible, and the  
blessing of life, of a new day in the sun, will ultimately prevail.

************************************************************

The above in an excerpt from Bending Toward the Sun: A Mother and Daughter Memoir

There may be some errors due to the scanning process. Please refer to the 

finished book for accuracy. 

Copyright © 2009 Leslie Gilbert-Lurie, author of 

Bending Toward the Sun: A Mother and Daughter Memoir<
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Author Bio

Leslie Gilbert-Lurie, author of Bending Toward the Sun: A Mother and  
Daughter Memoir, is a writer, lawyer, teacher, child advocate, and a  
member and past President of the Los Angeles County Board of Education.
Gilbert-Lurie also is a founding board member and immediate past  
President of the Alliance for Children's Rights, a non-profit legal  
rights organization for indigent children, chair of the education  
committee for the Los Angeles Music Center, and a board member of  
several schools including Sierra Canyon and New Visions Foundation.  
Finally, she has just completed serving as a member of the mayor's  
task force charged with developing a new cultural plan for the City of  
Los Angeles.

Previously, Leslie spent close to a decade as an executive at NBC,  
where, at various times, she oversaw NBC Productions, Comedy, wrote  
television episodes, and co-founded a new NBC in-house production  
company, Lurie-Horwits productions. As a lawyer, Leslie worked briefly  
at the law firm of Manatt, Phelps, Rothenberg and Tunney and served as  
a Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals Law Clerk. She is a graduate of UCLA  
and UCLA School of Law.

Leslie lives in Los Angeles with her husband, son, 

daughter and step- son.


For more information please visit http://www.bendingtowardthesun.com/