The daughter of Holocaust survivors, Ellen G. Friedman was born in Kyrgyzstan, a republic of the Soviet Union. She is professor of English and founding director of Holocaust and genocide studies at the College of New Jersey and is on the Faculty Advisor’s Council for the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University. Her books include Joyce Carol Oates, Breaking the Sequence: Women’s Experimental Fiction, Morality USA, and Joan Didion: Essays and Conversations. She is the author of The Seven, A Family Holocaust Story (Wayne State University Press). Most Polish Jews who survived the Second World War did not go to concentration camps, but were banished by Stalin to the remote prison settlements and Gulags of the Soviet Union. Less than ten percent of Polish Jews came out of the war alive-the largest population of Jews who endured-for whom Soviet exile was the main chance for survival. Ellen G. Friedman’s The Seven, A Family Holocaust Story is an account of this displacement. Based on primary interviews and told in a blending of past and present experiences, Friedman gives a new voice to Holocaust memory-one that is sure to resonate with today’s exiles and refugees. Those with an interest in World War II memoir and genocide studies will welcome this unique perspective.
