TY - BOOK ID - 77903082 TI - Sheymes PY - 2014 SN - 077359695X 9780773596955 9780773596962 0773596968 9780773544598 0773544593 PB - Montréal [Québec] DB - UniCat KW - Daughters KW - Children of Holocaust survivors KW - Holocaust survivors KW - Jews, Polish KW - Immigrants KW - Jewish families KW - Families, Jewish KW - Jews KW - Families KW - Emigrants KW - Foreign-born population KW - Foreign population KW - Foreigners KW - Migrants KW - Persons KW - Aliens KW - Polish Jews KW - Survivors, Holocaust KW - Victims KW - Holocaust survivors' children KW - Women KW - Wajnberg, Elizabeth, KW - Family. UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:77903082 AB - The daughter of Holocaust survivors, Elizabeth Wajnberg was born in postwar Poland. Evoking the past from the present, she gathers her family's history as it moves from the prewar years through the war to their arrival in Montreal. She traces through their own voices the memories that echo and have shaped their lives to present a portrait of a family whose bonds were both soldered and sundered by their wartime experiences. The people in this book are living sheymes - fragments of a holy book that are not to be discarded when old, but buried in consecrated ground. While embodying the world they have lost and the remnants that they carried with them, Wajnberg follows her family through their last decades. As her parents age and the author becomes their active and anxious caregiver, the book changes its perspective to accent the present - now the scene of trauma - when her parents join another demeaned group. Knowing their history, she senses that society turns away from the elderly the same way it looks away from the details of the Holocaust. Rich with humour and Yiddish idioms, Sheymes is a compelling and beautifully written memoir. In its illumination of the legacy of the Holocaust and the universal aspect of Jewish suffering, it resonates far beyond her family. ER -