BOOK REVIEWS

Title: Motherland

Author: Fern Schumer Chapman

"An outstanding portrait of the painful postwar waltz of Germans, their victims, and their victims' victims."

Kirkus Reviews

"Chapman knew little about her mother's childhood in a small German village, where hers was one of only two Jewish families, or how she felt when her parents sent her to the U.S. when she was 12, in 1938. Haunted as she was by the loss of her family, she never spoke of it, and so Chapman was surprised by her invitation to accompany her on a trip back to Germany. Measured and mesmerizing, Chapman's account of their unpredictable experiences, and the insights they gained into the anguish and guilt of the Germans who remembered her mother, constitutes a new and profound perspective on the legacy of the Holocaust. Turning journalistic pragmatism into an art form, Chapman allows each wrenching fact and observation to land in the mind like a stone in a pond, sending out ripple after ripple. No one survived the Holocaust unscathed, she realizes, neither Jew nor Gentile, and the sorrow is handed down from one generation to the next as inexorably as a gift for music, or beautiful deep, dark eyes."

Booklist

"Meticulously detailed account...which Chapman renders with precise and often moving prose."