The true story of a German-Jewish love that overcame the burdens of the past.Finalist for the 2017 Book of the Year Award by the Chicago Writers Association“A book that is hard to put down.”—Jerusalem Post“This book confirms Annette Gendler as an indispensable Jewish voice for our time.”—Yossi Klein Halevi, author of Like Dreamers“The ghosts of the past haunt a woman’s search for herself in this … Dreamers
“The ghosts of the past haunt a woman’s search for herself in this thoughtful, poignant memoir about the transformative power of love and faith.”
—Hillary Jordan, author of Mudbound, now a Netflix movie
“An exquisitely written conversion story which expounds upon personal and collective identity.”
—Washington Independent Review of Books
“A compelling, gracefully written memoir about the impact of the past on the present.”
—Michael Steinberg, author of Still Pitching
History was repeating itself when Annette fell in love with Harry, a Jewish man, the son of Holocaust survivors, in Germany in 1985. Her Great-Aunt Resi had been married to a Jew in Czechoslovakia before World War II―a marriage that, while happy, put the entire family in mortal danger once the Nazis took over their hometown in 1938.
Annette and Harry’s love, meanwhile, was the ultimate nightmare for Harry’s family. Not only was their son considering marrying a non-Jew, but a German. Weighed down by the burdens of their family histories, Annette and Harry kept their relationship secret for three years, until they could forge a path into the future and create a new life in Chicago. Annette found a spiritual home in Judaism―a choice that paved the way toward acceptance by Harry’s family, and redemption for some of the wounds of her own family’s past.
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Annette Gendler’s personal tale of jumping over the shadows of the pasts of both she and the man she loves to fearlessly forge a new future is a unique and compelling view of history you only thought you knew. As a German woman falling for a Jew from a family of still-raw war wounds, this is part Romeo and Juliet, part Shindler’s List, but more profoundly a deeply serious story of a journey that had to happen. Daunted and yet emboldened by the experiences of a star-crossed German/Jewish match in her own family, Gendler walks wide-eyed and open-hearted into not only the faith, but the life and significance of what it means to a Jew. Though conversion may have been the price to pay for love, she enters Judaism with the curiosity of a serious academic and researcher, determined to understand and do everything as perfectly as if she were born and raised Jewish. Along the way, the shadows that she’d feared become stepping stones as she realizes not only that she didn’t give anything up, but that this new world has changed her at the cell level as she shapes a new life and family of rich rewards.
This is a very easy-to-read, thought provoking book, and covers an awful lot of ground in relatively few pages about the thorny subject of intermarriage, and what it really means to all parties involved when a Jew considers marrying out of the faith. It challenges a lot of assumptions, and could well make many readers, Jewish or non-Jewish alike, uncomfortable in parts, because that’s what happens when you drill down and really start to explore how Jews are viewed in non-Jewish circles, and vice-versa.
But while those ‘real’ discussions are often very uncomfortable, they are crucially necessary, and Annette Gendler’s book excels in challenging assumptions, and prompting the reader to dig a little deeper, and to really get to grips with some of the facets of what intermarriage means in practise, particularly for future generations.
Perhaps because I’m thirty years into a Christian-Jewish marriage of of my own, Annette Gendler’s “exquisitely written” (Washington Independent Review of Books) memoir JUMPING OVER SHADOWS had me trembling from its start. Gendler was raised as a Christian in Germany. In 1985 she fell in love with a Jew. By that time, it was a perfectly reasonable and cosmopolitan thing to do. But consider Annette and Harry’s families of origin. During World War II Annette’s father’s entire family found themselves in mortal danger merely because Great Aunt Resi had married a Jew. The family’s response to the Jew and the danger he presented through no fault of his own was not always admirable. Meanwhile, Harry’s parents were Holocaust survivors who wanted to preserve their cultural heritage and weren’t easily able to shake off their experiences and ongoing fear. Self-protectively, Annette and Harry kept their relationship secret from both families for three years, at which point they had no choice but to present their bond as a fait accompli. JUMPING OVER SHADOWS is the “hard to put down” (Jerusalem Post) story of Annette and Harry’s ghost-haunted romance, of Harry’s family’s halting acceptance of the couple, and of Annette’s ultimate conversion to Judaism.