Helen Schary Motro’s The Right to Happiness is a compelling collection of stories about Holocaust survivors and their children. These are characters who live in New York City, suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, and try to pick up the pieces of their lives and start anew.
Many of the stories depict culture clashes between the second generation, born in America, and the survivors for whom “the Past was a subject so taboo that no one was allowed to broach it.” In “Parade,” Malka Shulamis, the daughter of two survivors, longs to partake in a uniquely American tradition: watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Her parents, unfamiliar with any world outside Brooklyn, try to make her dream come true, but are defeated by the subway system.
In “Homecoming on Riverside,” Motro uses magical realism to tell the story of Henny, who yearns to restore her murdered grandparents to life so that she can reunite them with her parents. Henny longs for grandparents, but she longs even more to make her family whole.
In “The Smoker,” Anna, another daughter of survivors, tries to connect with her grandmother who died in the camps. Her grandmother was a smoker, so desperate for nicotine that she would trade food for cigarette butts. Anna’s way of relating to her dead grandmother is to collect and smoke cigarette butts herself.
“Iron Eagle on West 11th Street reimagines the relationship between Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger. The reader need not be familiar with the story of the two: Motro reworks their attachment to each other, bringing about a surprise ending that upends everything the reader has experienced thus far.
The titular story centers Hilda, a survivor dealing with transitioning into an empty nester as her son prepares to leave for college. During these last days with him, the Six-Day War breaks out. Although she considers herself fully assimilated into American life and is not at all religious, the war reawakens her identification with the Jewish people, and she becomes wholly involved in the events in the Middle East.
The Right to Happiness is a triumph of ingenuity, filled with characters who are trying to make sense of the horror from which they’ve come and the new world in which they find themselves.
Jill S. Beerman grew up in New Jersey and attended Montclair State University. She has a doctorate in American Studies from New York University. She taught high school and college for twenty-five years.
