Was it Just a Matter of Luck? : A Family, the Holocaust, and the Founding of a Museum
Language: English
Published by Amsterdam Publishers Mär 2026, 2026
- Softcover
- New
Seller: AHA-BUCH GmbH, Einbeck, GermanyAHA-BUCH GmbH
AbeBooks seller since August 14, 2006
Condition: New
£ 41.96
Quantity: 2 available
Add to basketItem description from seller
Neuware - Intimate in voice and sweeping in historical reach, Was It Just a Matter of Luck bears witness to the endurance of memory and the moral force of survival. Through the voice of his mother, Ray Kaner - a fiercely intelligent young woman who endured four years in the Lódz ghetto, brutal slave labor, and near death in Bergen-Belsen - Dr. Charles Kaner reconstructs her harrowing passage through the Holocaust and the sustaining power of sisterhood that helped her survive.Interwoven with his own journey as a second-generation survivor, Kaner traces how Ray transformed unspeakable trauma into purpose. In postwar America, she became a quiet but determined force in the preservation of Holocaust memory, helping to establish one of the nation's earliest survivor-testimony projects and laying crucial groundwork for what would become the Museum of Jewish Heritage. At once a son's act of devotion and a profound historical reckoning, Was It Just a Matter of Luck asks not only how one woman survived, but how survival itself became a legacy.…
Seller Inventory # 9789493418752
- Title
- Was it Just a Matter of Luck? : A Family, the Holocaust, and the Founding of a Museum
- Author
- Charles Kaner
- Publisher
- Amsterdam Publishers Mär 2026
- Publication year
- 2026
- Condition
- Neu
- Binding
- Taschenbuch
- Language
- English
- ISBN 10
- 9493418758
- ISBN 13
- 9789493418752
- Item weight
- 345 grams
- Dimensions
- 229x152x15 mm
- Series
- Book 14 of 47: Holocaust Survivor True Stories
Tracing Ray’s life from an idyllic childhood in interwar Poland through the collapse of her world, Kaner brings readers inside the Łódź Ghetto with striking immediacy: the hunger that distorted time, the humiliation of forced labor, and the desperate ingenuity that kept Ray and her sister Sally alive. Through Ray’s memories – told to her son decades later during the COVID lockdown – Kaner reconstructs the threads of chance, instinct, and resilience that repeatedly saved her life when the slightest misstep could have meant death.
Parallel to his mother’s journey runs Kaner’s own: a boy raised in Brooklyn by survivors who rarely spoke of themselves; a dentist who built a life in New York; and, ultimately, an adult son determined to understand how his mother survived when so many did not. As he listens to Ray recount her childhood, the deaths of her parents, her years of slave labor, and the scars of liberation, Kaner also revisits the extraordinary second act of her life. In the 1970s, as her daughter Debbie entered high school, Ray helped pioneer one of the earliest efforts to collect survivor testimonies – grassroots work that would contribute to the founding of the Center for Holocaust Studies at Flatbush Yeshiva, a precursor to the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City.
Kaner shows how Ray’s lifelong insistence on telling the truth of what she lived became a moral engine that shaped institutions, touched generations of students, and continues to shape her family’s understanding of history, family, and obligation.
Both an intimate family chronicle and a sweeping historical testimony, Was it Just a Matter of Luck? reveals how a single survivor’s voice – clear, human, and uncompromising – can illuminate the Holocaust anew. It is a tribute to a mother’s strength, a son’s quest to understand, and the responsibility we all bear to remember.
"Synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author
Journalist, editor, and publisher, Joy E. Stocke works at the intersection of culture, history, and memory. A graduate of the University of Wisconsin - Madison with a B.S. in Journalism, she has spent more than 30 years collaborating with Holocaust survivors and their descendants - editing, shaping, and helping bring to life stories of individuals and families who emerged from profound loss into witness and renewal. As founder of Tree of Life Consulting & Publishing, Stocke mentors writers at every stage of development, guiding manuscripts from initial concept through editing, design, and publication. Her work is rooted in a deep belief that language, image, and story are essential tools for connection across difference.
"About the title" may belong to another edition of this title.
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