That author Lev Raphael will be the featured speaker at this year’s Milwaukee Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) commemoration may be a sign of a generational shift.
As the survivors of the Holocaust age and pass, it may be that more and more members of the “Second Generation” — the survivors’ children — will be filling this role in the future.
And Raphael appears to be a particularly thoughtful and creative representative of that group. He has been called “a pioneer” in writing fiction and non-fiction about members of the Second Generation.
As he told The Chronicle in a recent telephone interview, at Milwaukee’s Yom HaShoah event “I’ll be talking about how being Second Generation has shaped my life, my career, and my Jewish identity — and how I’ve come to a new freedom from the burdens of that past, though it hasn’t been all dark.”
In fact, “I speak to college age students all over the country, and I never complain; I explain,” he said. “In hearing me talk about my past, they can learn how to cope with their own family histories, whatever they may be.”
The event — “Memorial to the Six Million, Remembrance of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising & All Resistance” — will take place Sunday, May 1, 2:30 p.m., at the Harry & Rose Samson Family Jewish Community Center.
Raphael is a native of New York City. His father, who was from Hungary, and his mother, who witnessed the liquidation of the Vilna ghetto, both barely survived the Holocaust, and that legacy weighed heavily on him as a child in the 1950s and 1960s.
As he explained to one interviewer, he had “no past, no family remembrance, and that’s a lot for a little kid to grow up with.”
His parents were not religious, and Lev was 23 when he attended his first Passover seder. His parents spoke Yiddish and sent him to Workmen’s Circle Sunday school.
Raphael said being Jewish cannot be about sorrow and tragedy alone, especially if one is young. His career in academia and writing eventually led him to discover his own family’s history and enabled him to find joy in Yiddishkeit.
As an adult and a gay man, he and his partner “together started exploring how to connect ourselves to Jewish life, and I’m happy to say that our growing devotion to Yiddishkeit in many forms had a profound impact on one of my stepsons, who is now a Hillel director.”
Raphael earned an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Massachusetts and a doctorate in American Studies from Michigan State University. After teaching for 13 years, he became a full time author and reviewer.
He is the author of 19 books and his work has been translated into a dozen languages. His books are regularly taught in Jewish Studies classes around the country.
After writing several books that were translated into foreign languages, including German, Raphael had to confront his phobia of the country that killed his ancestors. When he was growing up, he said, Germany was a taboo, radioactive place.
Yet he found upon visiting that it is not what his parents knew and hated. His most recent book is a memoir of that visit, “My Germany.”
Raphael’s other books include “Dancing on Tisha B’Av” (1990), “Stick Up for Yourself”(1999), “Criminal Kabbalah: An Intriguing Anthology of Jewish Mystery and Detective Fiction”(2001), and “Writing a Jewish Life: Memoirs” (2006).
The Yom HaShoah commemoration will also include presentation of prizes to the winners of the Holocaust Youth Essay Contest, sponsored by the Habush Family Foundation.
Chair of the event is Amy H. Shapiro. Co-sponsors are the JCC and the Nathan & Esther Pelz Holocaust Education Resource Center of the Coalition for Jewish Learning, the education program of the Milwaukee Jewish Federation. For more information, call 414-967-8217.
Milwaukeean Susan Ellman, MLIS, has taught history and English composition at the high school level, and is a freelance writer at work on a historical novel.
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