Sandi L. Wisenberg author of Holocaust Girls: History, Memory & Other Obsessions (with Simone Zelitch)


"You don't have to be Jewish to be a Holocaust girl," Wisenberg posits in the first of her 24 perceptive essays, "but it helps." In other essays she speaks of the Jews' daily acceptance of the mystery of oneness with God, of visiting Franz Kafka's grave while attending a conference on anti-Semitism in Prague in 1992, and of a trip to Theresienstadt concentration camp, which is now a museum and where the tourists tote cameras and eat ice cream. Wisenberg, author of The Sweetheart Is In, remembers how she and her sister hid in the closet of their Texas home in the 1960s, pretending that Nazis were looking for them, and how she regretted not having observed all the traditional Jewish rituals at her father's funeral. With her lucid style and power of observation, Wisenberg's insightful essays are gems not to be missed.” George Cohen





Simone Zelitch


Simone Zelitch's first novel, The Confession of Jack Straw, won the University of Michigan Hopwood Award, and her second novel, Louisa, was the recipient of the National Foundation for Jewish Culture's Goldberg Prize. She began Louisa as a Peace Corps volunteer in Hungary, and finished the novel with help from the University of the Arts Venture Fund and a grant from the Pennsylvania Council for the Arts. A third novel, Moses in Sinai, is a revisionist retelling of the story of the Exodus. She teaches writing at Community College of Philadelphia and lives in Mount Airy with her husband and stepdaughter. She is currently working on a novel about Blacks, Jews, and 1964's Freedom Summer.



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