NJJN Online Greater Princeton/Mercer/Bucks Countoes Feature 101607

Author to speak at luncheon


Looking forward to an Oct. 23 luncheon program featuring author Ann Kirschner are, from left, Julie Feibush, JFCS director of senior services; Carey Bloom, a table captain for the luncheon; Lois Miller, luncheon chair; and Barbara Goodman, a JFCS senior services social worker. Photo by Marilyn Silverstein

NJJN Staff

Sidebar: Drops of time

Related Article: In Remembrance: Memoirs and novels capture the enormity — and the hope

ANN KIRSCHNER will discuss Sala's Gift: My Mother's Holocaust Story at a Jewish Family and Children's Service of Greater Mercer County luncheon on Tuesday, Oct. 23, at 11 a.m. at Greenacres Country Club in Lawrenceville.

The event promises to be an illuminating one, said JFCS executive director Linda Meisel. "We are very excited to bring Ann Kirschner to the community," Meisel said. "Her retelling of her mother's Holocaust story really keeps the experience of survivors alive."

According to Meisel, the funds raised by the luncheon will go toward three JFCS programs for seniors: matching funds provided by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, emergency financial assistance and home health-care assistance for needy survivors in the region, and sustaining the agency's Kosher Cafe and kosher meals-on-wheels programs. More than 20 Holocaust survivors in the community have been invited to the luncheon as guests of JFCS.

Chairing the event is Lois Miller of West Windsor, JFCS vice president for resource development. Miller, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, discussed the event's two themes, as she sat in the JFCS offices in Princeton with Carey Bloom of West Windsor, another member of the second generation who is serving as a table captain. "One is the Holocaust — continuing to remember that — and the other is our connection to the seniors in the community, just keeping this connection," said Miller.

Bloom said that Kirschner's book "touches anyone who has a direct contact or is the descendant of a survivor. It touches them at a different level. It's almost like your family. You have a strong sense of what they've gone through."

The luncheon will include book signings by the author, an auction, and a raffle. For reservation information, call JFCS at 609-987-8100.

Drops of time

MY MOTHER'S LETTERS didn't just fill in a blank spot on the map of her past. They brought her to life — my mother as a young girl — and they also led our family out of the shadows, the grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins who were killed during the war.

The letters were written by more than eighty different people. They told the story of a family, a city, and an elaborate system of slavery organized by government and embraced by businesses....

My mother and I read the letters together…. We talked and talked. She tolerated my questions and my tape recorder, offering up revelation after revelation as if the prohibition against sharing her memories had never existed. She was telling these stories for the first time and I was an eager listener....

Sala's letters are drops of time, spontaneous outpourings rendered with the shapelessness of real life, their emotions raw and unfiltered…. Instead of focusing on external events, these private papers create an emotional history of the war, a complex fugue of fear, loneliness, and despair, always returning to the dominant theme of hope for tomorrow."

— From Sala's Gift: My Mother's Holocaust Story

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