They Left It All Behind: Trauma, Loss, and Memory Among Eastern European Jewish Immigrants and their Children

Trauma was a potent influence in the lives of pre-1924 Eastern European Jewish immigrants. They uprooted themselves because of grinding poverty, anti-Semitic discrimination, pogroms, and the violence of World War I. This book’s psychoanalytically-informed life stories, based on 22 in-depth interviews with the immigrants’ adult children, tell the tales of these immigrants and their children.

Many of the children believed their parents had left their lives in Eastern Europe behind them. This d...