TORONTO — Women who write about the Holocaust was the subject of a recent panel discussion that included award-winning authors Karen Levine and Kathy Kacer.
“As a woman, I’m interested in writing stories from the inside out,” said Kacer, who wrote The Secret of Gabi’s Dresser. “What’s important to me is to be part of the inner experience of the child or whoever is going through that time in history.
“How the individual experiences events – what makes them courageous or not, what makes them fight or not, that’s the woman’s side I write from.”
Held at the 32nd annual Jewish Book Fair at Leah Posluns Theatre, the panel also featured writers Ami Sands Brodoff, who wrote The White Space Between; Gina Roitman, author of Tell Me a Story, Tell Me the Truth; and publisher Margie Wolfe, the co-founder of Second Story Press, which publishes feminist-inspired works.
“I’ve always felt that women deal with the subject differently than our male colleagues,” Wolfe said. “Their works feel different.”
Roitman, who’s based in Montreal, said that “women are natural repositories for stories, and those stories are usually told by women.
“My mother would say, ‘Your father tells you fairy stories. I tell you the truth.’ I think that these truths are buried in us a little deeper than in the male psyche.”
Roitman added that when she “started to write… her [mother’s] voice came through – these stories had a life of their own.”
For Brodoff, it was her late mother-in-law Brana Hochova’s cassette recordings – recollections of stories from Terezin, Mauthausen and Buchenwald concentration camps – that inspired her to write The White Space Between.
“I’m interested in the contradictory emotions of a survivor and child. Women are often forces of connections. Our writing can be a bridge between the dead and the living, and the past and the present,” she said.
Kacer, a former psychologist, said she felt “compelled” to tell the story of how her mother hid in a dining room dresser while Nazi officers searched her home in her children’s book, The Secret of Gabi’s Dresser.
Levine, a CBC Radio documentary producer, found her inspiration after a visit to Buchenwald at the age of 13.
“For Chanukah, I’d ask for concentration camp books,” said the author of Hana’s Suitcase. Published in 38 languages, the book has won more awards than any other Canadian children’s book.
After she read a story in The CJN about how 13-year-old Holocaust victim Hana Brady’s suitcase united her brother George, a survivor living in Toronto, with Fumiko Ishioka, director of Tokyo’s Holocaust Education Centre, Levine was inspired to produce radio and TV documentary about it and wrote Hana’s Suitcase for young readers.
“What struck me were the unusual combination of generations and continents – Europe, Canada and Tokyo –and the remarkable coincidence of how it came together. It was also the power of the little girl’s face and the power of the object – the suitcase. I loved the idea that the object was in some ways nothing, but it held a whole world inside of it.” Levine told The CJN.
What keeps the women writers engaged in the subject? Kacer said: “It’s the impact the subject has on you personally. I am so inspired by the heroism in every survivor – it’s that heroism I capture. That’s what keeps me writing those stories.”