Holocaust Girls

This bracing and vivid collection of essays gives voice to what many American Jews feel but don't express about their uneasy state of mind. In confrontation with this self-consciousness characteristic of Jewish culture, S.L. Wisenberg is both engaged and urgent. These essays creatively, and sometimes audaciously, address the question of what it means to be an American Jew trying to negotiate overlapping identities - woman, writer, and urban intellectual in search of a moral way. Whether she's writing about Kafka, the forgotten assassin of a low-level Nazi bureaucrat, Monica Lewinsky, or her guilt-ridden and paradoxical relationship with the victims of the Holocaust in "Anne Franks in Texas" and "Holocaust Girls", Wisenberg explores her subjects with finely tuned emotional accuracy. Her deeply ambivalent connection with the Holocaust reappears throughout these works as she struggles to find a way to live with history without being swallowed by it. S. L. Wisenberg teaches in the women's studies program at Northwestern University, and is the nonfiction editor of Another Chicago Magazine. She is the author of the collection of short stories, The Sweetheart Is In.