The Right to Happiness: After All They Went Through - Review

The Right to Happiness: After all they went through

By Helen Schary Motro

Published by Amsterdam Publishers, June 2024.  238 pages

Available both as a hardcover and as a paperback. It can be purchased online or at any good bookstore.

Available also in electronic version on Kindle via Amazon

Reviewed by Cindy Moritz

As is often the case, getting to know the person behind the written word reveals much about the substance of a book. In this instance, a just-published collection of short stories titled The Right to Happiness: After all they went through, by Helen Schary Motro, comes to vivid life after a meeting over coffee… and tea with the author.

Described as, "The reverberations of trauma and tragedy upon Holocaust survivors and their post-war children", this was an unexpected thread in Helen's collection of vignettes which was accepted for publication before October 7, 2023. It now resonates in a more immediate way, a purely unintended outcome. She has brought us timely lessons of living post-trauma in the 21st century.

I could just trot out Helen's many accolades and it would be an impressive introduction to the person behind the name on the cover. An American lawyer who has been living and working in Israel for many years, Helen is well known in ESRA circles, particularly among second generation Holocaust survivors who formed a bond through the organization in the 1990s at Helen's prompting. She is also a teacher, published writer and trusted contributor to the ESRA Magazine. But over a cup of tea – regular, with milk – I get a glimpse into the human being, in many of her layers.

We meet at a discreet coffee shop in Kfar Shmaryahu, Helen's stomping ground, and order our drinks. Helen asks for English tea with milk on the side. The Israeli waitress is not convinced. Who drinks that here? It turns out that some of us do, including many of our readers, no doubt. "This is in the book," quips Helen, as the pedestrian act of ordering a hot drink becomes the curtain raiser for our conversation about how life mirrors fiction. The stories, it becomes evident, are peppered with incidents that I can't entirely believe are made up.

"It's all fiction," says Helen of her collection of stories interconnected by the thread of experience of second-generation Holocaust survivors. But, as with the tea story, all fiction is grounded in some kind of truth that makes one wonder. The tea scene in the story German Lessons may be made up, but here it is unconsciously playing out years after it's been written, and we both relate. The tea arrives. "Look," says Helen, "you can see by the tag it's not English tea." We both smile. We are taking a moment to remember the character of Mordechai who ordered tea in the British Cultural Center's coffee shop, and who, when he saw the familiar W on the tag of the teabag the waitress had brought, "knew it was the regular Israeli variety. She had forgotten the milk."

"All writing is semi-autobiographical," says Helen, "but, for example, I have no experience with delinquent boys," she says, referring to the characters in her story Korczak's Boys. She does, however, remember a school principal in Israel who had a portrait of Janusz Korczak on his wall, and she allowed her imagination to take over from there. In another story, The Parade, there's a little girl who bursts with anticipation to at last attend the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade that year. To avoid any spoilers, let's say the result is not a Hollywood ending, and the child is left deflated and disappointed. It feels so real and raw, as if written from a true and formative experience. "That one was also fabricated," says Helen, although she did include details from similar incidents that she remembers when her immigrant mother would ask her to speak to the locals in "beautiful English". What she has created is a tapestry of different responses, mainly from the perspectives of younger people, to being the child of Holocaust survivors. "Our childhood is the most powerful influence over us," says Helen, who has drawn on those very emotions and recollections.

In writing these stories, not all at once and over a few years, Helen tried to explore people who had different experiences in new societies. "The people who fit in are not protagonists of literature," she points out, and I think of her story The King of Yiddish, where Holocaust survivor Solly finds himself on an almost empty train in the middle of the day after being made redundant after more than 30 years working at a Yiddish radio station. The story ends with Solly finding his resolve, speaking the words, "In spite of everything…" as he maps his way forward. "A lot of fiction is not happy," Helen points out, and lists a few examples including Anna Karenina and The Grapes of Wrath. Despite this, in these stories people manage to find a glimmer of hope, even transcend their inherited or direct trauma.

So much of what's in these stories speak to the human condition and the themes and observations take on a timeless quality. Our conversation drifts back, as it does in these times, to the current reality of being in Israel after October 7, 2023. The stories resonate beyond the second-generation Holocaust survivor experience and take on a quality of immediate relevance despite having been written and submitted for publication well before the latest cataclysmic event in the Jewish world.

Helen was influenced by her own mother's ability to remain optimistic after witnessing and living the worst of human history. "I was lucky with people," Ola Schary had told her daughter. Having been broken out of the Warsaw ghetto, Ola survived by working as a housekeeper and adopting the identity of a deceased Roman Catholic woman, Helen recounts in an essay she wrote for Newsweek in the early 2000s. "Don't hold a grudge, forgive," is what her mother believed, and Helen still embraces the belief that all human beings want the same thing despite our different cultures: to feel good in our own skin, have a quiet time, not go to war.

We get to the eponymous story, The Right to Happiness, which is the last and longest of the collection. More so than any other story, Helen didn't expect this one to be as relevant as it is today. Here, an assimilated survivor, when faced with Israel's imminent annihilation in 1967, discovers her inexplicable attachment to that little Jewish country far away from her life on Riverside Drive. Here we have a profound exploration of the disconnection and at the same time connection of Diaspora Jews to Israel, then and now. The invisible cord, possibly held through intergenerational memory.

We must hold on to hope, Helen reiterates, and remember that we can and will survive. It's the overarching theme of her collection, and encapsulated by the epigraph that, while not her first choice, turned out to be exactly the right one for this book: "To remember is a kind of hope." – Yehuda Amichai. In The Right to Happiness, Helen is giving us access to that memory, a reminder that we cannot give up on happiness, despite what we have gone and are still going through.

After our meeting, I feel compelled to re-read the stories which have now taken on a different dimension having met the person behind the fiction. Helen has brought the characters of her childhood to life, if not literally then in some kind of universal way, as reminders to us all we can and will survive, even after all that we've been through. It's a valuable, timely and much appreciated message.

The Right to Happiness: After all they went through was published by Amsterdam Publishers in June 2024. It is 238 pages and is available both as a hardcover and as a paperback. It can be purchased online or at any good bookstore.

Post Note: Helen added: "In the 1990s when special concerns of the 2nd generation Holocaust survivors became widely recognized, I approached Merle Guttmann inquiring if ESRA would reach out to 2nd generation people in our area and sponsor a get-together. She immediately graciously assented. An afternoon meeting was held in my home with over 40 people attending. Some of us became friends for years.