About this item
The story of the generation of hidden child survivors told through the true experiences of three Jewish girls - from Poland, Holland, and France - who transcended their traumatic childhoods to lead remarkable lives in America.Only one in ten Jewish children in Europe survived the Holocaust, many in hiding. In Such Good Girls, R. D. Rosen tells the story of these survivors through the true experiences of three girls.Sophie Turner-Zaretsky, who spent the war years believing she was an anti-Semitic Catholic schoolgirl, eventually became an esteemed radiation oncologist. Flora Hogman, protected by a succession of Christians, emerged from the war a lonely, lost orphan, but became a psychologist who pioneered the study of hidden child survivors. Unlike Anne Frank, Carla Lessing made it through the war concealed with her family in the home of Dutch strangers before becoming a psychotherapist and key player in the creation of an international organization of hidden child survivors.
About the Author
I was born in Chicago, raised in Highland Park, Illinois, educated in public schools, then Brown and Harvard. I have two daughters, Lucy and Isabel, two brothers, and a sister. I'm of Polish descent on my father's side, Lithuanian on my mother's. At different times I've been a journalist (The Boston Phoenix, contributor to the New York Times, New York magazine, and many other publications) , a television comedian (PBS, HBO, Saturday Night Live) , a book editor (Workman Publishing, ESPN Books) , a writing teacher (Harvard, The Business of Sports High School in NYC) , a television news producer (CBS, PBS) , and a chef at a hippie restaurant. I started by writing poetry as a teenager. At Harvard, where I studied poetry with Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop, I won the American Academy of Poets Prize at Harvard in 1971. Ironically, by then I had already renounced poetry for prose. I suppose that, if anything distinguishes me as a writer, it's the variety of books I've published, from intellectual journalism to Edgar Award-winning mystery novels to bestselling humor books to narrative nonfiction about genocide. This may not be the shortest route to a coherent public identity, but, since my 20s, my different selves - from brooding introvert to arch extrovert - have wanted to express themselves, chiefly in books. Whatever day jobs I've held in other media, I've always returned to writing books. I've never really wanted to be anything other than a writer, except an electric guitarist and a nightclub singer--career paths blocked by my lack of musical talent and my painfully mediocre, though enthusiastic, singing voice. My latest book is Such Good Girls: The Journey of the Holocaust's Hidden Child Survivors, which was born of a chance meeting with Sophie Turner-Zaretsky and the inchoate feeling that, as a privileged Jewish product of one of the safest places in the world to be a Jew, I finally needed to confront the genocide of my own people.
