Not to Believe is a memoir of a Yeshiva boy, an ex-hippie, a new age pilgrim, a high flyer in the high tech boom. It is the story of finding love and losing loved ones. Exploring the chasm between Holocaust survivors and their children, it celebrates the quiet miracle of reconnection between a father and son. It is the story of overcoming loss and grief to find love and make peace with history.
Michael Kirschenbaum’s memoir, Not to Believe, tells of growing up on a chicken farm in New Jersey with a father who survived Auschwitz with a sense of humor and a gift for telling stories. There were stories of ghettoes and death camps, stories of his mother who struggled through the war with the Jewish Resistance in the Polish woods and his father’s black market adventures in Postwar Germany. As a child he hid from those stories, from the tattoo on his father’s arm, the triangle marking him as a Jew below the number 83193 that served as his name in Auschwitz.
As a young man he fell in love with a woman and he describes their love was a true wonder, enough to start a new faith. Thirty years later he loses that love to cancer and his father helps him with his grief and he comes to know his father as a man and not an icon.
Interwoven in this compelling narrative is the little known story of Jewish chicken farmers in New Jersey.
One of the chapters, “Forgiving God in the Catskills†was the winner of the Catskills Institute and the Jewish Studies Program at Loyola Marymount University non-fiction writing contests: “The Catskills and the Holocaust.â€
Quote from Jewish Book Council web site:
“Forgiving God in the Catskills†focuses on a visit to Kutsher’s Country Club in the Catskills to celebrate Rosh Hashanah, with a Holocaust survivor and his sons. Memories of the Holocaust punctuate the holiday services, as the Catskills are themselves memorialized as the places where “The greeneh were happy to mingle with the others who still embraced a Jewish culture with European roots.â€