cover image Nightmare's Fairy Tale: A Young Refugee's Home Fronts, 1938–1948

Nightmare's Fairy Tale: A Young Refugee's Home Fronts, 1938–1948

Gerd Korman, . . Univ. of Wisconsin, $19.95 (186pp) ISBN 978-0-299-21080-9

Fifty-three years after being chased out of Nazi Germany, Korman returned to the land he'd called home for the first 10 years of his life. He and his younger brother visited the places throughout Europe that had marked their itinerant youth: their first home in Hamburg, a Polish refugee camp and then Talaton, the English town where they found refuge as part of the Kindertransport. Korman movingly recounts his childhood years as a refugee in war-ravaged Europe and then as an immigrant in the United States. With a scholar's gift for historical analysis, Korman (a professor of American history at Cornell) uses his experiences to explore the self-contained world of American-Jewish immigrants and the scattered experience of growing up in several countries and on two continents. While Korman's tale is more fortunate than those of many Holocaust survivors—he was eventually reunited with both his parents—his identity was irrevocably shaped by the trauma of his teenage years. The young adult who emerged was a collage of disjointed personas: an American Jew eager to embrace his new home, an immigrant who never shed the traces of his foreign accent and a historian eager to tell the story that defined him, his family and his people. (Dec.)