ABSTRACT
When I grew up in the United States and Canada, telling stories about their past lives in Europe was not at all the way of many of our grandparents who had arrived as refugees from politically, socially and economically dire situations. There was too much pain involved. My own grandparents never told stories about the ‘old country’, as they called their former homes in Eastern Europe. Only after their deaths, research into archives and history books made me realize that they had fled from pogroms in their home towns at the end of the nineteenth century. Their lives in Europe had been full of fear; in the New World they concentrated their energies on living a new and fuller life and trying to forget about the painful past. No curiosity on the part of their children or, more commonly, on the part of their grandchildren could reveal anything about the past. It was taboo to ask; we sensed this and did not pursue the questions.
