This Is Home Now: Kentucky's Holocaust Survivors Speak
At the end of World War II, many Holocaust survivors immigrated to the United States from Europe in search of a new beginning. Most settled in major metropolitan areas, usually in predominantly Jewish communities. However, some settled in smaller cities and rural areas, including in Kentucky, where they encountered an entirely different set of circumstances.
This Is Home Now: Kentucky’s Holocaust Survivors Speak presents the accounts of nine of these survivors. Using excerpts from oral history interviews and documentary portrait photography, the book explores the survivors’ lives with a particular interest in their reasons for settling in Kentucky, their initial reactions to American culture, and their reflections on integrating into life in the United States.
Kentucky’s Holocaust survivors are remarkably diverse, as were their wartime experiences. If they share a common trait, it may be their resourcefulness and adaptability, their readiness to call a place where little was familiar home.
“Until Donahue and Howell turned their recorders and cameras on these well-chosen survivors living in Kentucky, no one had taken the time to ask how these solitary transplants made new lives for themselves and their children in rural middle America. The stories and images reproduced in this book are both moving and arresting. We owe Donahue and Howell a great debt for rescuing them before they disappeared down the trapdoor of historical memory.”