Author panel featuring Susanne (Sanne) Kalter DeWitt, Grace Feuerverger, and Simi Monheit.

11:00am | Conference Room

Jewish Arts and Bookfest
Sunday, May 4, 2025

at UC Berkeley’s Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life, 2121 Allston Way, Berkeley,  CA

For three or more generations, writers have wrestled with the legacy of the Holocaust. This panel includes authors who wrote a survivor’s memoir, a child of survivor’s memoir, and a novel written by the child of young survivors who escaped Nazi Europe, landing in the United States as children. Each author threads the needle of Holocaust survival through their stories, yet each is unique, illuminating and inspiring in its own way. Brief excerpts will be read from these storytellers with shared history and individual moxie, their combined tales unspooling different responses to a time in history we have collectively endured but may never fully comprehend.

About Susanne (Sanne) Kalter DeWitt

Susanne (Sanne) Kalter DeWitt, a Jew, was born in Munich, Germany in 1934, during the Nazi era. Her parents were members of the Munich Jewish community. Sanne describes her deportation to Poland, her arrest on Kristallnacht, followed by incarceration in Dachau concentration camp. She escaped Nazi Germany and lived as a refugee in a number of countries. Sanne eventually settled in the US, had a career in Molecular biology and raised a family in Berkeley, together with her husband, Dr. Hugh DeWitt. She is a member of the Modern Orthodox Synagogue, Congregation Beth Israel.

I Was Born In an Old Age Home

A powerful memoir, I Was Born In an Old Age Home (Publisher Barany Publishing) is the story of a life well lived after a harrowing and lucky childhood escape from Germany and the Nazis. Sanne DeWitt writes a fascinating, sometimes tragic, but often humorous, tale of her long, improbable life. 

Presenting a broad sweep of historical details that have shaped her long and eventful life, from Germany to Holland, London and Wales, and from there across the Atlantic. There are chapters in New York, at Cornell University, where she did her undergraduate studies, and back to Germany again with her husband, Hugh, an astrophysicist, who had landed a Fulbright fellowship at Heidelberg University.

A personal story of perseverance and strength—from escape from Nazi tyranny to her husband’s courageous fight against above ground nuclear testing and the challenges her family experienced with a drug addicted daughter.

About Grace Feuerverger

Grace Feuerverger was born and raised in her beloved city of Montréal surrounded by a multitude of languages and cultures inside and outside her home. She is professor emerita of education and ethnography at the University of Toronto, and taught courses on language, culture and identity as well as peace education for many years.

Grace was educated at McGill University, the Università per Stranieri in Perugia, Italy, the University of California at Berkeley, the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and the University of Toronto. She has also been an invited member of the Canadian Commission for UNESCO for many years.

Among her many publications are two award-winning books: Oasis of Dreams (about a cooperative Jewish-Palestinian village in Israel) and Teaching, Learning and Other Miracles (about education as a sacred life journey) and her new book Winter Light: The Memoir of a Child of Holocaust Survivors.

Although now retired, her heart will always be in the classroom with her students. Grace and her husband divide their time between Toronto and Berkeley.

Photo credit: Andrey Feuerverger

Winter Light: The Memoir of A Child of Holocaust Survivors

Winter Light (Amsterdam Publishers), a second generation memoir, is a story of hope and gratitude and it adds a rather different piece to the mosaic of Holocaust literature.

Grace, a child of Holocaust survivors, was always searching for shelter but knew that her home was the last place where she could find it. She was eager to be out there in the world, but at every turn had to battle the demons which permeated her home – hissing their frightening, grim messages.

It wasn’t the language and culture of her people that saved her; it was the language and culture of strangers. At the core of this story stands a little girl struggling to find a path toward the Life force and to escape from the demons of despair that permeated her home. Winter Light is about a sequence of serendipitous rescues—an emotional rags-to-riches story.

Montréal offered Grace the chance of a lifetime. She was four years old when she discovered the joie-de-vivre of her French-Canadian neighbours in the working-class east end of her beloved city. As she grew older other serendipitous ‘rescues’ arrived in surprising ways in many different places.

Vivid and lyrical, Winter Light is a deeply moving memoir dedicated to all who are coming from places of trauma. It is about the vast unknown territory ¬of the human heart in spite of the ghosts that still haunt us.

About Simi Monheit

Born and raised in Brooklyn, Simi Monheit calls Northern California home. The Goldie Standard, her debut novel, was named one of the Hundred Best Indie Books of 2024 by Kirkus Reviews. Her work focuses on Jewish themes and has appeared in JewishFiction.net, The Forward, Moment, Lilith Magazine, among others. Most recently The Goldie Standard won the Women’s Fiction category in the 2024 American Fiction Awards and was a Best New Fiction Finalist in the 2024 Pacific Book Awards. Simi was Pushcart Prize nominee (2020), placed in the 2O20 Writer’s Digest literary fiction short story contest, and even won the 2022 Pacifica Literary Review bodice ripper contest. When she’s not writing she’s hiking. Or talking with friends. Or trying to figure out what her adult daughter (of whom she’s inordinately proud), is up to. Simi started writing after a career in technology. She’s a graduate of Stanford’s Novel Writing Certificate program, has a Master’s degree in Computer Science and an undergraduate degree in English.

Photo credit: Jana Marcus

The Goldie Standard

Poignant and funny, bitter and sweet, The Goldie Standard (Sibylline Press) is about life, in all its facets and complexities. It isn’t strictly a romcom, nor does it specifically address intermarriage and Jewish Identity, intergenerational relations and generational trauma.

It does all of that, and more.

Goldie Mandell, a Yiddish-speaking Holocaust survivor stuck in an Assisted Living Facility, knows that life comes at you every single day. She also knows that she’s not going to let a few ups and downs control her. Thing is, Goldie isn’t content with controlling only her own destiny, she’s trying to control everyone else’s as well. That’s why she’s convinced she can mastermind her granddaughter Maxie’s love life by researching doctors, faking illnesses, and securing Maxie as her medical advocate. She’ll get her granddaughter in front of every eligible and acceptable – meaning Jewish – doctor in the New York Metropolitan area.

But, Maxie has her own voice, and as much as she loves and cares for her grandmother, she’s inherited her grandmother’s strength and determination, along with her romantic heart.