My mother's family didn't speak much about Europe: My mother was born in 1935, and her new-world parents were the sort who didn't want to worry their children about the war.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
My parents were of the generation that lived through the Second World War, but I grew up listening to my mother recounting her dad's tales about his terrible experiences during the Gallipoli campaign in 1915 and later on the Western Front.
In the months leading up to World War II, there was a tendency among many Americans to talk absently about the trouble in Europe. Nothing that happened an ocean away seemed very threatening.
Both of my parents were first-generation Americans, the children of Jews who left Eastern Europe around the turn of the century.
And then in 1956 or 1957 my family went over to Europe and I moved over with them, and immediately people in Europe thought my perspective on that issue was 100% correct.
My family history, like that of many Polish, German and Jewish families from Central Europe in the 20th century, is complex.
The World War I, I'm a child of World War I. And I really know about the children of war. Because both my parents were both badly damaged by the war. My father, physically, and both mentally and emotionally. So, I know exactly what it's like to be brought up in an atmosphere of a continual harping on the war.
I wanted to write about my mother as she should have been if she had not been messed up by World War I.
I'd say my mother made more of a difference to me than anyone else did. I know that's a conventional and perhaps mundane answer, but my family was blown apart at the start of World War II.
My parents had three kids right after the Second World War, and we were all sort of sickly. Then I had a fourth sibling, with very serious asthma. The medical bills... So my parents always struggled.
I am imprinted with the whole sense of European history, especially German history, going back to World War I, which really destroyed all the old values and culture. My grandparents had been reasonably well-off but they became quite poor, living in an attic apartment.