Sandra Hurtes
Author, Teacher, Coach
“Sandra Hurtes’s Rescue: a Memoir is a valuable addition to the literary genre of the second generation of Holocaust survivors in America. Hurtes views the Second Generation through the lens of psychotherapy, and eloquently shows how even well-meaning professionals might not appreciate the special significance of the post-liberation family. This valuable, heartfelt chapbook shines with honesty as it intermingles tragic loss, humor, and affirmation of life. Rescue is ultimately about members of the “Second Generation” finding their own voice.”
~Eva Fogelman is a psychologist who is writer and co-producer of Breaking the Silence: The Generation After the Holocaust and author of Conscience and Courage: Rescuers of Jews During the Holocaust.
“I enjoyed Rescue – if “enjoyed” is the right word.
Ms. Hurtes has written a sensitive, fluid, occasionally humorous masterpiece about her tumult and ongoing identity crisis. She is the American-born daughter of Jewish survivors of the Nazi Holocaust – new immigrants to the United States who are searching and working towards a safe future and happy life. Her parents rescued their future children from the fate they had suffered by being someplace else other than blood-soaked, xenophobic Europe.
The author agonizingly searches to understand and find a way out of the weight her parents’ unprecedented memories have laid upon her, and a way to deal with her parents’ pain – albeit second-hand. She writes of her difficult dual affiliation to the old shtetl roots and the new American ones, which she finds incompatible and emotionally divisive.
She describes her ambivalence about identity, love, loyalty, independence, a delicately-described resentment, guilt, and ‘boundaries’ both desired and feared. The author has inherited an emotionally-weighted legacy to manage while seeking happy self-fulfillment as a writer…In my opinion, the rescue of all subsequent generations belongs in civil society, providing that we learn important lessons from both personal stories and the historical perspective. What they are saying about:
On My Way To Someplace Else (Poetica Publishing 2009) “Sandy Hurtes reveals the conundrum of the survivor of survivors, the child confronted with the notion she can only move forward by healing the injured parent, and the fact that there is no hope of achieving this."
Judy Weissenberg Cohen
Witness / survivor
Editor, http://www.womenandtheholocaust.com
"…On My Way to Someplace Else is a collection of essays from Sandra Hurtes reflecting on her childhood of growing up with Holocaust survivor parents. These essays have been previously published elsewhere, but here they are compiled and give readers much to appreciate through Hurtes' work. On My Way to Someplace Else is a top pick for memoir collections."
Midwest Book Review
"Ms. Hurtes' book is a powerful rendering of a struggle that, although it does not result in an ultimate victory over the emotional challenges she faces as the daughter of Holocaust survivors, her unyielding effort not to be traumatized has created a story of small, redeeming victories."
Dr. Arthur Flug, Exec. Director, Kupferberg Holocaust Resource Archive Center
"In her straightforward voice and gentle prose, Hurtes relates her struggle to move forward, while learning to move out from under the weight of her guilt. The essays are alternately funny and heartbreaking."
Brooklyn Daily Eagle
"Unlike many manicured stories about identity or over-exaggerated tales of family suffering, Hurtes chooses the honest route, complete with warts, confusion and emotional discomposure."
Mickey Pearlman, What To Read
"Hurtes writes with grace and delicacy about her not so ordinary life, about childhood as the daughter of Holocaust survivors, about the complexities of survival as a single woman in a great metropolis, about dating, knitting, strolling, writing. In doing so, she fronts the uncertainty of life as well as its mystery."
Meena Alexander, Fault Lines: A Memoir
Maureen Brady, co-founder of The New York Writers Workshop