Tearing the Silence: On Being German in America

Brilliantly interviewed by award-winning novelist Ursula Hegi, postwar German immigrants speak out about the legacy of grief and shame that continues to haunt them here in America. Like Studs Terkel in his classic "Working," Hegi uses the art of the interview to see deeply into the personal histories of these women and men as they confront--at last--the terrible and pervasive silence that made any mention of the Holocaust taboo in their homes and schools while they were growing up. Echoing some of the themes Hegi explored in her bestselling novel "Stones from the River," this powerful and provacative oral history is the first book to capture these long-silent voices. "Tearing the Silence" is an important document of what it is like to grow up within the numbing silence of postwar Germany, a moving story of what it means to live between two cultures.