Hats of Glass

Hats of Glass is a collection of short stories about the children of Holocaust survivors. This book tells the tale of the Second Generation which is ostensibly growing up in a world that has undergone a healing process. But in this world sons and daughters bear their parents’ scars and cannot escape the torment of the past. In “A Personal Holocaust,” Daphne undergoes a violent experience in London which turns into her own personal holocaust. Her mother had lost her first family in the Holocaust and the trauma takes the form of a reliving of her mother’s tragedy. In “Music Doesn’t Cover,” a young German woman named Veronica falls in love with an Israeli, the son of Holocaust survivors. She chooses to identify with the victims and confronts the past courageously. In the final story “Epilogue,” a young Israeli woman visits the death camp of Auschwitz and encounters a Holocaust survivor who decides to return to the site where he had lost everyone he loved forty years earlier. He says, “There a great darkness emerged. They say time heals. They say I will be healed. I am grateful for the sun and the new light, but on the heads of my children, my anguish and torment sit like a hat of glass.”