Painful Joy

Painful Joy

A Holocaust Family Memoir

Two Holocaust Survivors and their multi-dimensional Journey of Love and Loss.

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About the Book

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.

LAUNCHED on 28 April 2022, Yom Hashoah

Finalist at the 2023 Next Generation Indie Book Awards in the category Autobiography / Biography

You will find a lot of interesting podcasts on the author’s website

Article on Ynetnews

Painful Joy 2023 Next Generation Indie Book award
Painful Joy by Max J. Friedman 2023 Next Generation Indie Book award

 

 

 

Author Max Friedman & Publisher Liesbeth Heenk in Brooklyn, March 2022
Author Max Friedman & Publisher Liesbeth Heenk in Brooklyn, March 2022
Details
Author: Max J Friedman
Series: Holocaust Survivor True Stories, Book 20
Genre: Holocaust
Tags: Audio rights available, Award-winning Publication, Foreign Rights Available, Holocaust memoir
Format: paperback
Length: 380
ASIN: B09R4HGXJY
ISBN: 9789493231825
Rating:

eBook Price: $4.99
A sweeping and nuanced story of living with the effects of trauma. 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.
– Kirkus Review
Painful Joy is like no other Holocaust story I have read. It is mostly biography ... But it is also memoir ... and autobiography ... all told against the backdrop of a once vibrant Jewish life in Poland, the Holocaust, and immigrant life in the United States ...
– Gerald Darring, Co-Director, Gulf Coast Center for Holocaust and Human Rights Education, Mobile, AL
Factual content, precise descriptions of environs, explanations of customs and mores ... 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.
– Millie Jasper, Executive Director, Holocaust & Human Rights Education Center, White Plains, NY
A narrative unique to second-generation Holocaust survivors’ experiences that searches to understand 'beyond the ghosts that haunted them.'
– John Heffernan, Director, Genocide Prevention Initiative, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and President, Foundation for Systemic Change
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.
– Rabbi Steven Silberman, Congregation Ahavas Chesed, Mobile, AL
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Max J Friedman

Max J. Friedman realized early in life that the world he lived in was very different from what most others his age would ever experience. He was born in Sweden to Sam and Frieda, Polish-Jewish parents who met and married there after their liberation from Bergen-Belsen and then emigrated to the US in 1952.
Max and his sister learned very little from their parents about their parents' lives before WWII or what they had gone through during the Holocaust, and much of what they did learn from them, it would turn out, did not really happen. What was real were their parents’ years of ghettos, slave labor and concentration camps like Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, which Sam and Frieda endured while suffering the horrific loss of their families: spouses, parents, siblings and children.
Max’s family experienced the after-effects that flow from parents who have survived such horrors. When it came time to care for their elderly survivor parents, Max and his sister well understood that they too would have to become survivors. This book is the story of this family’s journey of discovery, transformation and acceptance.
It was a long time coming. After getting a BA from Columbia College and a Master’s of Journalism from UC Berkeley, Max spent the next five decades first as a journalist and then in related writing fields, including public television, leading a communications group for a major pharmaceutical company, and operating his own editorial consultancy. He married and has twin sons and two grandchildren. After spending a career discovering and then sharing the stories of so many others, and more recently completing the memoirs of two complex personalities, he found himself reexamining his own past, spurred by a question from his grandson. The result is Painful Joy, an effort to finally uncover the truth of his parents’ extraordinary journey of survival and the effects it had on others.
Traveling to Poland, Germany, Israel and Sweden, he sought to help restore his parents’ humanity by uncovering who they really were, apart from damaged survivors: where they came from, the lives they once led, their lost hopes and dreams. He learned how all that had unraveled, leaving dual legacies of pain and resilience for future generations. This retelling of what he discovered and what remained hidden was more complicated than he could have imagined. It is a story that goes beyond his own family to explore larger questions about the nature of survival, the tricks our memories can play on us, how hate can destroy and how love can restore. In the process he transforms Sam and Frieda, who start out as strangers, into people who merit our attention, empathy and respect.

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