Emily Wanderer Cohen - From Generation to Generation: Healing Intergenerational Trauma Through Storytelling

With wisdom, compassion, honesty and courage, Emily Wanderer Cohen tells us what it was like to be the daughter of a Holocaust survivor. Iflike meyou had parents who went into the camps as children and came out as survivors, Cohens narrative will have you nodding your head and remembering. If your parents or grandparents were not in the camps, Wanderer Cohens book will teach you about the permanence of suffering and the true power of forgiveness.

JOHN GUZLOWSKI , author of Echoes of Tattered Tongues: Memory Unfolded , Winner of the 2017 Ben Franklin Award for Poetry

Emily Wanderer Cohens courageous and engrossing memoir of being a child of Holocaust survivors will resonate with other second-generation offspring of historically traumatized parents. A must read!

EVA FOGELMAN , Ph.D., author and co-producer of Breaking the Silence: The Generation after the Holocaust, a PBS Documentary

Those of us who carry the legacy of the Holocaust understand why and how the story isnt over. In fact, for many of us the search has just begun. There are questions and memories that have not only been too terrifying to face, but also some have even been considered forbidden. How do we face or even dare to reveal the agony of abuse from a parent? Their rage would remain a deep secret, a terrible source of shame. In her book, From Generation to Generation: Healing Intergenerational Trauma Through Storytelling , Emily Wanderer Cohen defies the boundaries of fear and, with a tremendous sense of courage, opens up a safe space for dialogue. We are known as The People of the Book. We are taught that through words we became part of creation. May these words be part of the healing one generation most definitely prayed to bestow upon the next and the next.

CHAYA ROSEN , author of In the Shadow of God, Poems of Memory and Healing

Emily Wanderer Cohen makes an invaluable contribution to our understanding of how historical trauma is inherited and how it manifests in our daily lives. With courage, insight and compassion for her mother, and the traumatized generation who survived the Holocaust, Emily breaks an unspoken taboo and unflinchingly bears witness to her own suffering as a Second Generation survivor. Out of the specificity of her transformative story emerge universal truths that can guide us on our own healing journeys. At once a memoir, as well as a workbook for descendants of any historical trauma wanting to transform their own wounding, Emilys moving narrative demonstrates the power of self-revelatory storytelling to unburden and heal a traumatic past.

ARMAND VOLKAS , MFT, RDT/BCT, Psychotherapist, Drama Therapist and Theatre Director, son of resistance fighters and Auschwitz survivors, Director of Healing the Wounds of History Institute

Emily Wanderer Cohen has written a book with such BRUTAL HONESTY, that I actuallyphysicallyfound myself shaking while reading it. Her writing is revelatory, BLUNT, and poetic in its NONCONFORMITY. As a fellow Holocaust artist and historian, I say with complete conviction that this book will be a voice for our entire generation in ways that NOTHING before it has. An EXTRAORDINARY work of art a MUST read.

TOBY GOTESMAN SCHNEIER , Holocaust artist and historian

Emily Wanderer Cohen has written a powerful and poignant memoir about what it means to grow up as the child of a Holocaust survivor. From Generation to Generation doesnt pull any punchesit exposes ongoing consequences of the atrocities of the Holocaust of which most of us are totally unaware. While important for the second and third generation survivors, this book is even more relevant for the rest of us. The horrors of the Holocaust dont die with the survivors. Cohens book reminds us that 70+ years later, theres still work to do.

LINDA POPKY , author of Marketing Above the Noise: Achieve Strategic Advantage with Marketing that Matters

Healing Intergenerational Trauma Through Storytelling

Emily Wanderer Cohen

NEW YORK

LONDONNASHVILLEMELBOURNEVANCOUVER

From Generation to Generation

Healing Intergenerational Trauma Through Storytelling

2018 Emily Wanderer Cohen

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or otherexcept for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Published in New York, New York, by Morgan James Publishing in partnership with Difference Press. Morgan James is a trademark of Morgan James, LLC. www.MorganJamesPublishing.com

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ISBN 9781683507574 paperback

ISBN 9781683507581 eBook

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017913989

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For Josh and Rachael, who witnessed Mutti traumatize me even as an adult. The cycle stops with you. I love you both.

And for Mutti, I forgive you.

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.

Maya Angelou

I didnt start to write this book. Rather, I started writing what most second-generation Holocaust survivors (2Gs) write: their Holocaust survivor parents story. I felt driven to document it even though Mutti (mother in German and what I called my mom) had completed a video interview for the USC Shoah Foundation and had given many talks about her experiencessome of which were on videotape, tooto middle- and high-school students in Portland and Seattle. I wanted to get it on paper once and for all.

But when I handed over my first essay to my neighbor, a former high-school English teacher and writing coach who had graciously offered to help me write some essays that might or might not eventually turn into a book, she said, Emily, where are you in this story? I replied, Its not my story, its Muttis story. She looked at me in complete disbelief. Is it? she asked me.

For the next week or so, I kept thinking about her words. Was she right? Was it actually MY story that needed to be told? Slowly, I began to put myself into the essays, but getting in touch with my emotionsbeyond the overriding anger and resentment I feltwas extremely difficult. Each week, thinking I had dug as deeply as possible, my neighbor would push me to go deeper.

I started to feel exposed, naked, all my imperfections on display for the reader to see. Then I realized something: I had such a difficult time getting in touch with those feelings because I had put them out of my mind in order to survive the years of emotional and physical abuse. I couldnt feel sadness, shame, and hurt because I had taught myself NOT to feel those emotions, focusing instead on anger and resentment.

Which was exactly what Mutti had to do in concentration camp: ignore her emotions in order to survive. By focusing her anger and resentment toward Hitler and the Naziseven long after the Holocaust endedshe was able to continue living. Every day was a struggle for her, I realize this now. I spent so much time being angry with Mutti for her inability to let go of her anger, and being resentful of her for abusing me, that I couldnt feel compassion for her. The clear perpetuation of Holocaust trauma was too obvious to ignore. And that is how this book came to be.