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How To Tell Your Children About the Holocaust cover
How To Tell Your Children About
the Holocaust
Ruth Mandel

In How to Tell Your Children About the Holocaust a daughter maps her father's childhood in the holocaust and the continuing impact of that experience on her family. Ruth Mandel's very modern journey into the meaning of the holocaust as a legacy is marked with furious sorrow and tender understanding. Poems like "Round One Goes to the Parents" take the reader through a family's journey toward openness and understanding, exploring the power of secrets within a family and the struggle to create dialogue. With historical documents and photographs, How to Tell Your Children About the Holocaust, reads with the narrative strength of history in the first person. Includes an introduction by holocaust historian Sir Martin Gilbert

Winner of the Isaac Frishwasser Memorial Award for Holocaust Literature

 

"…moving and evocative…"
Canadian Jewish Book Award Committee

"A pond murky with ash from the ovens, human hair collected for the mattress factory, ten bales of cloth that bought a boy's life – with such poignant images Mandel entices us into her family recollections and leaves us changed buy our experiences there."
Geist Magazine

"Ruth Mandel in How to Tell Your Children About the Holocaust has tackled a world of pain, bringing into poetry lost relatives, both those she has met and those far more numerous who were murdered long before she could make their acquaintance. She is dealing with the fallout of history in the lives of the children of survivors, with the aftermath of the Shoah for survivors, and with those who did not survive, but whom she takes as her duty to remember."
Marge Piercy

"These poems will be read, and re-read, with deep emotion, by men and women of goodwill of many different backgrounds and generations – and read by parents to their children."
Sir Martin Gilbert

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