Mamaleh

In Mamaleh: A Legacy of Loss and Love, Elaine Culbertson has created a new kind of Holocaust survivor story. It is a memoir that combines both her mother, Dora Freilich’s, personal recollections of her life as a survivor as well as her own reflections on growing up in a family that had experienced the trauma of the Holocaust. Dora’s survival of two full years in Auschwitz was indeed a miracle, but her beautifully expressed memories of that time as well as the life that she and her husband built in America are miracles as well.

In this sometimes startling, sometimes funny, but always poignant memoir, the reader will be immersed in a family that experienced the challenges of survival, immigration, and assimilation as told in the words of a mother and daughter who came from two different worlds but who forged a relationship based on love and respect.

Author Biography

For many years Elaine Culbertson served as program director of the Holocaust and Jewish Resistance Teachers’ Program founded by Vladka Meed that provided professional development to more than 1100 teachers in its 36-year existence. At present, she works with teachers and students to connect the events of the past with the present day. Elaine has written chapters in five different books on Holocaust teaching methods and lectured across the United States, using the story of her own parents’ survival as the basis for her presentations on developmentally appropriate and morally responsible pedagogy.