Aftermath by Annette Libeskind Berkovits

Coming of Age on Three Continents. A Memoir

In Aftermath: Coming of Age on Three Continents, Berkovits brings a fresh perspective on the motivations and courage of a family who abandoned their former lives to forge a brighter future.

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About the Book

“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.

Details

Author: Annette Libeskind Berkovits
Series: Holocaust Survivor True Stories
Genre: Holocaust
Tags: Audio rights available, Foreign Rights Available
ASIN: B0B5RLTT2K
ISBN: 9789493276390
List Price: $19,95
eBook Price: $2,99

As a non-native speaker of English I was amazed (and a little jealous) of Annette Berkovits’ linguistic ability when I read her memoir, Aftermath. She not so much learned languages as absorbed them. Growing up speaking Polish, she quickly became fluent in Hebrew when her Holocaust survivor parents were finally able to obtain exit visas and moved to Israel in 1957. When a couple of years later the family moved again, this time to New York, when Berkovits was 16, she only knew two things about America: the Statue of Liberty and Coca-Cola. Yet she quickly mastered enough English to gain access to one of New York City’s most prestigious high schools, skipping the mandatory entrance exam and graduating with honors. Many immigrants, especially young people, will relate to Berkovits’ story: the feeling of loss and the urge to return to the place where one had matured. Her yearning for Israel became so strong in New York she even dreamt of stowing away on a ship to return. Israel had become her home - the place where she left many of her closest friends. But soon after Annette graduated college the miasma of the Holocaust she’d carried from childhood began to lift as she embraced her American life with new dreams.

– Benno Groeneveld, retired U.S. correspondent for Dutch and Belgian media

Aftermath is the remarkable memoir of two resourceful children and their parents as the they emerge from the losses of the Holocaust. In cinematic, unsentimental language, Berkovits places us at the scenes of the crimes: “In our family alone, at least sixty people had been exterminated: aunts, uncles, cousins and my maternal grandmother.” But she also depicts personal victories, such as her classroom walkout with four Jewish girls to protest being shamed in school during Christian prayers in Poland or getting into one of the most selective public high schools in America without taking the required entrance exam. 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

Aftermath by Annette Libeskind Berkovits is one of those necessary books that provides are 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. The book is the tender and disturbing coming-of age memoir of the author as she is wrenched from one place to another and repeatedly finds herself having to learn a new language and the ways of yet another culture. It is also a little-treated story of gender in this population, as the family deals with the post-war reduced status of the father and his support of the author’s younger brother, who would grow up to be the renowned architect Daniel Libeskind. This book is a sequel to her family Holocaust memoir, In the Unlikeliest of Places, which is an unusual depiction of Jewish survival in the Soviet Union and has been translated into Polish. Aftermath is Berkovits’ fifth book. The Corset Maker, her fourth book, a historical novel was released in March 2022.

– 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.

Aftermath is an enthralling coming-of-age memoir recounting the hardships and challenges facing a young girl's family in the years following the Holocaust. Searching for a place to call home, they move from a valley in Kyrgyzstan to the streets of war-torn Poland and then to a kibbutz in Israel, a land of dazzling contrasts. The children quickly learn Hebrew and relax into the communal lifestyle of the kibbutz, but life is not easy for the parents. The mother, a talented seamstress, has little interest in farming and, more importantly, the father, not speaking Hebrew, cannot find a job in Israel. What to do? Go to America, 'the Golden Land.' 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.

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 from Kyrgyzstan in Central Asia, to Poland, to Kibbutz Gvat, then Tel Aviv and finally New York, 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 is the Judaica Director at the San Diego Jewish Academy. He is an author of ten books, the latest being Women and God.

Aftermath is a delightful memoir that draws you in with its lively, child’s-eye perspective. Spanning three continents, the book vividly depicts the constrictions of post-war Poland, the vibrant energy and material rigors of the young state of Israel, and the expansiveness of the post-war American dream. 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 of the Office of Religious & Spiritual Life and Advisor to Jewish Students at Vassar College and Board member of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association.

Annette Libeskind Berkovits’ Aftermath is a gorgeous bouquet of a book, chronicling her 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; an award-winning author and journalist who spent more than three decades as a foreign correspondent and editor for Newsweek. Former Vice President and director of public policy for the East-West Institute, an international affairs think tank. Author of Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power, 2012; The Nazi Hunters, 2016; and 1941: The Year Germany Lost the War

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Annette Libeskind Berkovits

Author, poet, educator and scientist, Annette Libeskind Berkovits was born in Kyrgyzstan, a former Soviet Republic, near China’s western border. She is the daughter of Polish Jews who survived World War II in Soviet gulags. Daniel Libeskind, the noted international architect and master planner for rebuilding Ground Zero in New York, is Annette’s brother.

Annette received her primary education in Łódz, Poland and in Tel Aviv, Israel. On her arrival in New York as a teenager Annette entered the highly selective Bronx High School of Science not speaking a word of English, the only student to ever be admitted without taking the required entrance exam. She earned a BS in Biology from City College of the City University in New York in its heyday and, later, a master’s degree in Educational Administration and Supervision from Manhattan College.

In her three-decade career with the Wildlife Conservation Society, based at New York’s Bronx Zoo, Annette became one of the Society’s first female Senior Vice Presidents. During her tenure, she led the institution’s nationwide and worldwide science education programs and spearheaded partnerships among school systems and conservation organizations. Berkovits negotiated the first ever agreement to bring environmental education to China’s schools, long before China became an industrial power. Later her programs spread to Papua New Guinea, Bhutan, Cuba, India and elsewhere.

For several years, she served as the Chair of the International Association of Zoo Educators. Even before being elected to lead the international association, she convened the First Pan American Congress for Conservation Education in Venezuela attended by representatives from dozens of nations.

Recognized for her leadership in the field of science education by the National Science Foundation, Berkovits authored and edited numerous science education publications for children and teachers. She continues to pursue her life-long love of writing full time.

Her poetry has been published by the Review: a Literary Crossroads; Persimmon Tree; American Gothic: a New Chamber Opera; Blood & Thunder: Musings on the Art of Medicine; and in The Healing Muse. Her essay appeared in Curator: The Museum Journal.

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 and reissued in paperback in 2016. A Polish translation, titled Życie Pełne Barw was published in Poland by Biblioteka Centrum Dialogu in 2020.

Her second memoir, Confessions of an Accidental Zoo Curator, chronicling her career in entertaining stories, was published in April 2017. Berkovits also published a poetry collection, Erythra Thalassa: Brain Disrupted in 2020.

Her coming-of age memoir, Aftermath will also be published in 2022.
Berkovits and her husband divide their time between Manhattan and Florida.

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