Growing Up A Child of Holocaust Survivors, Author Pearl Goodman, To Speak in Chicago

CHICAGO - May 5, 2014 - PRLog -- “A thought provoking memoir” is what the Jewish Tribune called the book while a review on Bookplealsures.com said it is "a powerfully moving book that deals with the lingering intergenerational effects of the horrific history of the holocaust." A third review said that Peril "sits in the memory, long after it has been read and laid aside".

In her book, Ms Goodman a former teacher turned psychotherapist whose parents survived the Holocaust, describes her experiences as a child juggling the angst of her parents and its impact with her desire to fit into contemporary North American society during the 1960s and 1970s. She deftly manages to present her story and the perspectives of her parents, her brother, and herself with insight, laugh out loud humor, and empathy.

Ms Goodman gave two presentations at Holocaust Education Week in Toronto this past November of what she calls the Post Holocaust story. Her other talks have been at synagogues, libraries and bookstores. The book’s title Peril is both that terrible feeling of dread, and coincidentally, her name as it is pronounced in Yiddish.

The subtitle contrasts popular culture with the jarring contradictions in the author's and her parents' lives. Striving to make sense of her emerging identity, she invokes TV shows, ads, movies, and distinctive details of the material and ideological landscape, while interweaving them with her parents’ harrowing wartime experiences of concentration and refugee camps, or, in her words, 'the unison beat of thousands of pairs of jackboots clicking and echoing on pavement so many years before my time, and the little girl that I was, listening to the insipid whining of Jack Benny on TV.'

The talk will be on May 12 at 11:45 AM at the East Bank Club, 500 N Kingsbury St, Chicago (312-527-5800)

For more information on the book, visit http://bridgeross.com/peril.html

Peril: From Jackboots to Jack Benny, ISBN 978-0-9878244-6-2, 300 Pages, distributed by Ingram and available from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and in Kindle and Kobo versions.