CATCHING UP WITH MYSELF: Memories & Musings is a memoir that integrates two narrow periods of time and place…Europe 1938-1941 and New York City in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Part One is a survivor’s story that introduces me to my family and to myself. It embraces our lives in Germany, our emigration, and our arrival in America. Part Two is an immigrant’s story told from the perspective of a young child in a new country…my thoughts, my search for belonging, my connection to my mother, and my first taste of what would become the city I love so much.
It is a universal story to which others can relate in our desire to survive, to be safe, to belong, to connect and participate, whether native born or immigrant.
CATCHING UP WITH MYSELF:
Memories & Musings
by Judy Bleiweiss Birke
8.5 x 11 Hardcover
268 full-color pages
100+ Photos and Ephemera
$60.00
“Judy Birke’s memoir is a sensitive, personal account of how she and her mother narrowly escaped the fate of the six million who were murdered in the Nazi genocide of the Jews during WWII. Hers is a story that is told with eloquence, grace, and a moving, poetic style, leading the reader to draw impressions that can be deeply felt and, therefore, truly memorable. Reading this story is more like hearing a personal account from a friend, rather than a distant witness.”
— IRA KLEINFELD, Professor Emeritus, University of New Haven
“Extraordinarily affecting! Historical, yet timely! This unique coming-to-terms Holocaust memoir of a mother and daughter’s miraculous survival includes photographs, original documents, and masterful poetry. As it moves from the harrowing past to the rhapsodic ‘50s to the redemptive present, you too will be sympathetically caught up!”
— HENRY ALAN PAPER, author, The Myron Stories: My Search For Meaning
Catching Up With Myself is a family history beautifully told through poetry and lyrical prose. Integrating historical details, photographs, and carefully crafted phrases and questions, Judy Birke constructs a captivating and layered portrait of the extraordinary and ordinary life of a Jewish mother and daughter alone in a new world.
— DAPHNE GEISMAR, author, Invisible Years: A Family’s Collected Account of Separation and Survival during the Holocaust in the Netherlands
“Among my favorite moments, ‘I don’t want to be different. I wanted to skate in Central Park like all the other American girls.’ This in a sense is the heart/theme of the book. In itself that’s not an unusual immigrant story. What makes the story unusual is that in order to feel “normal,” the writer had for years put into the background all the painful material of the Holocaust and its consequences. The collaged work really feels like a wonderful answer to her granddaughter’s question, ‘Tell me about your parents.’ The book feels really written primarily to accomplish that purpose, a memoir of tough self-questioning and solid research.”
— ALLAN APPEL, author, The Book of Norman and At the Holocaust Ball
JUDY BIRKE was born in Hamburg, Germany in 1940. She came to the United States as a baby and spent her formative years in Massachusetts and New York City. After receiving her education, she settled in New Haven where she dedicated her working life to the passion she felt for the visual arts.
She began an art consulting business, working for many years with corporations, museums, galleries and individuals, crafting collections and doing art appraisals. She was also the Director of the Munson Gallery in New Haven and worked as an Art Critic for the New Haven Register and Art New England. She has served on various Boards in New Haven including the Arts Council and the Creative Arts Workshop.
In 1997, in an effort to learn about her family’s roots and the complex narrative of their lives during the Holocaust, she made her first trip back to Hamburg to ask questions and find answers. This began a dedicated journey that continues to this day, the research culminating in many forms of writing that include poetry and essays. This memoir is a result of that work.
(PHOTO: USC Shoah Foundation)
JUDY BIRKE 