Joseph Berger (1) (1945–)

I found this book by chance when I happened to read an article, not long ago, by Joseph Berger in the NY Times about immigrants. He mentioned that his family stayed in lodgings on 87th Street that was provided by a Jewish charity. My father, in his personal memoir/notes, had written that we stayed in lodgings provided by another Jewish charity, but also on 87th Street. So I wrote to Berger and it turned out that we were staying in the same place and it was called Capitol Hall.
So I bought his book to see what else we might have in common. It turned out there was quite a bit. His mother was from Otwock. My father's family lived in Warsaw and vacationed a few miles from Otwock in Swider. But those two places were really worlds apart.
His parents spent the war in the Soviet Union. My parents also spent the war in the Soviet Union. But their experiences, once again, were worlds apart.
And once in the United States, although we spent the first few years in New York (in Brooklyn, not the Bronx), we then moved to Los Angeles, and as everyone knows, that is a whole other world.
So, as much as we had in common, we also had very different histories and experiences. But so what? Berger's book is interesting, very well written, and in some parts very moving. Many people think of the Holocaust as the murder of six million Jews. But not all Jews were in camps. Some like Berger's parents and mine, escaped Poland and went to the relative safety of Russia, and their Holocaust stories are significantly different. Nevertheless, his parents lost most of their family members who had stayed behind, and my parents lost all of theirs. That we certainly did have in common.… (meer)