Broken Birds by Jeannette Katzir - Does Your Parents’ Past Affect Your Life Today?
Broken Birds - The Story of My Momila by Jeannette Katzir is a book about author’s life up in a dysfunctional family of five siblings, headed by her mother Channa and her father, Nathan, both Holocaust survivors. The premise of the book is that the many problems of the children were the direct cause of the suffering her parents endured when they were young.
As baby boomers, most of us had parents who grew up in the shadow of World War II and the Great 
Depression. During the early years of Katzier’s story, my mother was one of 6 children whose family struggled with too little money and the prospect of war looming. To this day, she keeps an over-flowing pantry and two freezers full of food stored up for some possible day of shortage. Those years affected her views of money, family and many other things.
My father too was a survivor of the depression years and a 17 year old Marine at the start of the war. He survived three years in the Pacific Islands, seeing more death and horror than anyone should ever have to see in an entire lifetime. He was physically wrecked for most of the rest of his life from those three years of starvation and deprivation. All his life, he suffered from what would now be called Post Traumatic Stress Disorder but back then, men were just told to buck up and get over it.
These experiences made my parents stronger, if less tolerant of weakness in others. They are toughened and hardened but when it came to family, my parents were determined that we would never suffer from anything they’d lived through in the past.
I’m sure most boomers have experiences and memories passed down to them by their parents which helped to form them into the people they are today. The question that arises from Katzir’s book is what causes some to rise above the suffering and horrible memories of their past to become better people and parents and what causes others to pass their bitterness and anger to the next generation, continuing that hold of evil from the past?
Another point that came up for me was - when do you stop blaming your parents for your own miserable life and take responsibility for how you live each day?
When I was studying for my degree in history, World War II and Nazi Germany was one of my areas of interest so the early story of Channa and Nathan was a familiar one to me. Channa was born in a small town in Poland and was just a young child when the German army took over. She was 12 when her father was taken away, never to return, while her mother and sister and her brother Issac, with his wife and small children, were forced into a ghetto. When Issac’s wife and children were killed in a pogrom, he took Channa with him to join the partisans in the forest where they survived for two years.
Returning to their home town, they found all their family gone and eventually, brother and sister made their way to America.
The author’s father, Nathan, was born in Czechoslovakia and his experiences are condensed into a fairly short chapter. His family was deported to Auschwitz in 1944, where his entire family perished in the death camp the first day. Nathan survived the gas chamber selections and beatings and eventually sent on a work detail to the Warsaw Ghetto, to clean up the rubble left by the Jewish uprising there which led to its ultimate destruction. The allied army was coming closer so Nathan was sent to Dachau, where he managed to escape.
Nathan and Channa eventually came separately to America, where they met married. This background information on the author’s parents would be a story all unto itself if it were delved into thoroughly but it actually takes up only about 75 pages of this 373 page book. The rest is devoted to what happened to the author, and her family relationships with her two brothers and two sisters.
The author’s premise is that the dysfunctional nature of their family (constant fighting and bickering over seeming petty issues) was caused by her parents being Holocaust survivors. One way you could look at this book is how horrific experiences early in life affect your life and parenting skills later on. Channa lost all her family, except for the brother she ended up fighting with continually, so she clung passionately to her husband, constantly in fear that he would leave her. Her jealousy and constant complaining put a wedge in their marriage and harmed her children.
On her husband’s side, when he hit her and put bruises on her, Channa told her children and their spouses that it was just the lot of a wife to endure this treatment. What’s more, she told her daughters that they should expect such treatment in their own marriages.
As a mother, Channa was sadly lacking. She actually told her children she didn’t want them to be successful because then they wouldn’t need her anymore. She loaned money to certain children to buy homes and start businesses and not to others, setting up rivalries between them as they learned to equate money with love. Channa told the author if she wanted to catch a man she needed to “look trashier.”
Channa’s five children had battles with each other all through their lives but some of that was also brought about by greedy spouses whose parents presumably were not in the Holocaust. These siblings entered into business agreements with each other and then fought over them, going to petty levels to get back at each other. It seemed they constantly expected more from each other than they could ever get.
At one point, the author was using her sister’s addrss to send her children to a better school. When the sister got angry over something, she informed the school that these children did not live at her address, causing a rift that was brought up again and again as the author continued to be angry over it.
The final part of the book is actually about what happened after Channa’s death. When she dies, she totally cuts her husband out of her will, leaving the entire estate pretty much to her youngest son - who in the view of the author was always her parents favorite child. Left destitute by his wife, Nathan quickly marries again, setting off another set of problems.
Once Channa is dead, the author finds out that actually the father she’s pitied all these years because of her mother’s treatment of him, isn’t really a very nice guy after all and by everyone focusing on the mother, he got away with being a petty, angry person in his own right.
Since the family had settled in southern California, just one of the homes Channa owned was worth over $1 million dollars and for the rest of the book, we are treated to a blow by blow description of the legal procedures and even the emails these quarrelsome siblings exchanged, spewing anger and hate at each other as they fought over the proceeds of their mother’s estate.
Most of the book, this part included, is a “he said, she said” sort of thing, seen only from the author’s view point. As a person who has been involved in various family disputes over the years, I know there is more than one side to any story and it would be interesting if each sibling wrote their own book, I think, because we aren’t getting their side in this story.
All in all, I think the author is trying to analyze the reasons why her family is so dysfunctional and the fact that her parents are Holocaust survivors is a convenient rack to hang that hat on. I imagine all of her life, she’s made excuses for her parents based on this fact of their early lives. As she gives them this excuse, she is also giving herself and her siblings an excuse for their own behavior. Her parents were “broken birds” who passed their brokenness on to their children, who, apparently had no say in how they live their own lives 65 years afterward.
The book is interesting in that most of the time, we read about Holocaust experiences but not about what happened later to the survivors - how they raised families and handled their terrible memories. However, I would be willing to bet than a great many survivors managed to rise above these experiences to become loving parents to their children, trying to make their own children’s lives better than their own had been.
Granted, my parents experiences would be considered mild to a Holocaust survivor but the fact remains that many people have difficult and even horrible experiences in their younger years and it doesn’t turn them into petty, quarrelsome people who would stab their brother or sister in the back for a few dollars.
Perhaps the way each individual handled the Holocaust and its aftermath has more to do with the kind of person they were to begin and how they decided to live their lives than it did the terrible experiences they lived through. That is a decision each and every person must make in their lives, Holocaust survivor or not.
What kept me reading this book? Honestly, I was hoping that the author and her siblings would realize they needed to forgive - both their parents and each other - and move on to some sort of healthier resolution of their family issues but alas, this was not to be.
Did your parents’ past affect the kind of parents they were? Do you think your parents’ past can still affect you today?
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