A legacy of loss and love

In Mamaleh, the Book, Elaine Culbertson has created a new kind of “Holocaust survivor story.” It is a memoir that combines both her mother, Dora Freilich's, personal recollections of her life as a Holocaust survivor and her own reflections on growing up in a family that had experienced more than its share of trauma. Dora’s survival of two full years in Auschwitz was indeed a miracle, but her beautifully expressed memories of that time as well as of her arrival in America are miracles as well. 

In this sometimes startling, sometimes funny, but always poignant memoir, the reader will be immersed in a family that experienced the challenges of survival, immigration, and assimilation as told in the words of a mother and daughter who came from two different worlds but who forged a relationship based on love and respect.

To have lived the Holocaust through stories she heard often and then to have read her mother’s words compelled Elaine Culbertson to share what it was like to be raised by immigrants who had witnessed the deaths of their families and still had the courage to bring children into the world.

Some survivors never talked about their experiences, but Elaine lived in a world where the stories were her daily nourishment. A curious child, she hid nearby when her parents and their friends talked about what had happened to them, absorbing their tales even when she was too young to really understand what it all meant.

It took Elaine years to realize that her parents’ stories were effective not only when she taught about the Holocaust in her classroom, but also as a springboard for her own writing. At first, she wrote to understand, but soon she was reading her pieces to family and friends who marveled at her ability to weave the two threads into a tapestry of twentieth century existence.