Winter Light: The Memoir of a Child of Holocaust Survivors by Grace Feuerverger
Reviewed by Aviva Rubin
The setting for Grace Feurverger’s Winter Light: The Memoir of a Child of Holocaust Survivors is the beautifully described working-class Montreal of her childhood, but the ever-present backdrop is the Treblinka extermination camp, to which the author’s parents, their families and the entire Jewish population of Częstochowa, Poland, were deported in 1942. Most perished, including her mother’s two little brothers, for whom she felt deeply responsible.
In their Montreal apartment, three- or four-year-old Grace catches her mother staring at a wall, talking to those boys in soothing Yiddish or Polish—a tone, the author states, reserved only for them. When she tries to reassure her mother that they are safe in heaven, she screams “They are here! Don’t ever say such a thing again.”
Winter Light moves back and forth in time and place—from the author’s beloved Montreal, to her travels in Israel and Europe, to her time at Berkley, where she meets her husband Andrey, also a child of holocaust survivors, and finally to Toronto, where she becomes a tenured professor at the University of Toronto, lecturing widely on language, culture, trauma and education.
From a young age, the author knows that what she wants from life cannot be found at home—a place she renders more in fuzzy, bleak snapshots than full descriptions: a mother’s harsh judgment and resentment of her daughter’s desire for a bigger life; a quiet, withdrawn father woken screaming by nightmares, yet capable of brief embraces, with a curious mind and a love of books—traits the author credits for inspiring her own passion for learning. She lovingly describes early visits to the Gatineau Library, and a beautiful scene where the two sit side by side in the living room, discussing their books.
At one point, looking back, Feuerverger remarks that the house she grew up in only appeared to be “attractive and lively.” Those words, albeit in the author’s mind, an apparition, come as a surprise. While she describes so many other places in vivid detail, her family home is left virtually blank, as though committing it concretely to the page would render it painfully indelible.
The bleakness is occasionally punctuated by more uplifting stories, such as a family trip to New York City to see The Ed Sullivan Show. The author’s father marches them past a line that stretches around the block and into the building. He insists on seeing the manager, pleads their case and secures tickets. After the show, he takes his family back to the dressing room, where they meet a young Ann-Margret. Back at the car, Feuerverger’s mother cheerfully exclaims,
“This is the man who saved my life in the concentration camp.” It feels absurd yet almost sweet that the feat of securing tickets reminds her who he was at Treblinka.
Mostly, joy and hope are found elsewhere. Early on, they reside in the language, culture, food and warm embrace of Grace’s Catholic French-Canadian best friend and her family, where an angel sits atop the Christmas tree and the Virgin Mary occupies a place of honour on the wall. The author, who throughout her life will seek mother figures and role models, wonders if—despite being Jewish—Mother Mary could be her Holy Mother too.
Filled with anecdotes of parents incapable of embracing or really seeing their unique daughter, the memoir swings between soaring achievements and crushing disappointments—a young girl’s powerful drive doing battle with a sense of unworthiness.
The author’s mother complains that Grace studies too hard, has too few friends, and doesn’t help her clean or cook enough. Stellar report cards elicit comments about a friend’s pretty child: “For a girl, beauty will get you much farther in life than smarts. That’s how you get a good husband.” Curiously, after a tirade of complaints and comparisons, Feuerverger overhears her mother on the phone, bragging to friends about the very achievements she refuses to acknowledge directly.
As a child, Grace is chosen—after a city-wide search—to play the role of Alice, in Alice in Wonderland. Following a winning performance, she goes looking for her mother. About their encounter, she writes “I noticed the emptiness in her eyes. I knew that she had been in the audience but her expression was as if she hadn’t seen me at all.”
That same experience repeats years later, as her parents sit stone-faced in the audience while she receives her doctorate. They leave soon after the ceremony ends—no congratulations, no hugs, no signs of pride. Grace contemplates the cause of their coldness:
“[…] my parents’ loyalties were given fully over to those who had been murdered… the authority of the Holocaust had to be worshipped and I accepted this without question. After they exhausted all their emotional energies for the dead, there wasn’t much left for their children. Who was I to point fingers after what they suffered?”
Yet in defiance, and despite her mother’s attempts to keep her tethered by guilt, Feurverger boldly ventures out—seeking friendships, learning, travel, food, fashion and beauty. “My strivings for the life force were a crime against the order of things, a crime against the cramped vision of my mother’s world. I challenged the tyranny that reigned supreme.” But there is a price to be paid for the audacity of her ambition. She succeeds only by degrees, retreating often when she comes too close to these pleasures. Often betrayed by a body that feigns illness, she remains for a long time an outsider looking in.
In her mid-twenties—well into the memoir—the author begins, after some resistance, to see a psychiatrist who puts her on a path to setting boundaries and allowing herself to feel worthy and loveable. Even her husband Andrey—always a safe haven, whom Feurverger describes with deep love as her knight in shining armor, sweeping in to rescue her—can’t be the one to provide what she needs to heal. It is only the author who can do that. Letting go and eventually cutting ties, is a decades-long process.
Ultimately, Winter Light is a rumination on the meaning of survival and a search for belonging everywhere but where it should naturally be found—in one’s own family. With generosity, empathy, guilt, sadness and rage, the memoir probes the lives lived and the pain both suffered and caused—an affliction that, while defining the author, also enables her to soar. Despite her parents’ inability to accept their daughter, in the end, Grace Feurveurger becomes the embodiment of their survival.
About the Author
Grace Feuerverger was born and raised in her beloved city of Montréal surrounded by a multitude of languages and cultures inside and outside her home. She is professor emerita of education and ethnography at the University of Toronto, and taught courses on language, culture, and identity as well as peace education for many years. Although now retired, her heart will always be in the classroom with her students. Grace and her husband divide their time between Berkeley and Toronto.
About the Reviewer
Aviva Rubin is a Toronto-based writer of memoir, essays, social commentary and now fiction. Her writing has been featured in numerous anthologies, The New York Times, The Globe and Mail, The Toronto Star, Chatelaine, Toronto Life, Zoomer, Huffington Post, and Reader’s Digest amongst others. She is the author of the memoir, Lost and Found in Lymphomaland –– a harrowing and funny trip through a cancer diagnosis and treatment. WHITE, her debut novel, is the story of a young woman who grows up in a white supremacist family, rejects those views, then seeks to take down the movement from within - with dire consequences.
Book Details
Publisher : Amsterdam Publishers (Sept. 8 2024)
Language : English
Paperback : 302 pages
ISBN-10 : 9493322602
ISBN-13 : 978-9493322608