Journey Home : Emerging Out of the Shadow of the Past

The Journey Home is an engrossing anthology of twenty essays. Each one tells a different story about what it means to grow up in the shadow of the Holocaust and then to find a way of breaking free of the residual darkness of childhood by making a physical and emotional journey back into the past, to the home of one's ancestors: the home they were forced to physically leave.

Some of these journeys are undertaken with a parent. Others are undertaken with friends or partners and some venture back alone. Along the way, new connections are forged with the living and with the dead, with the past and with the present.

Together with an introduction and epilogue, the book provides not only examples of the lived experience of being second generation but also offers some theoretical background to the stories and relates them to current and important themes, such as the role of acknowledgement, memorialization and commemoration. With eighty million people around the world currently displaced by disaster, war and famine, many of these stories speak for descendants of refugees and survivors of all such catastrophes.

David Clark studied anthropology, completed his PhD on Jewish museums in Italy and taught tourism and heritage management. He previously co-edited a book on contested Mediterranean spaces and is currently on the editorial committee of Exiled Ink, devoted to works by exiled writers.

Teresa von Sommaruga Howard is an architect, family therapist and group analyst, focusing on the long-term effects of socio-political trauma. She has written and published extensively about all aspects of her work, which focuses on the process of encouraging dialogue in organizations and society.