My Separate Worlds: Daughter of the Holocaust and Evangelical Christianity - Paperback

"...beautiful and compelling..." -Lisa Moses Leff, Professor of History, American University, and winner of the 2016 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature

Excerpts long-listed for international 2019 Alpine Fellowship Writing Prize and awarded 1st Place in 2019 Essay Contest of Bethesda Magazine.

A memoir of survival. A mother's survival of the Holocaust. A daughter's survival of her legacy of trauma.

The little known story of Dutch Holocaust survivors escaping Nazi-occupied Europe through Vichy France onto a ship for Surinam.

Ingrid Alpern is the daughter of a Dutch Holocaust survivor mother and an Evangelical father from Indiana who divorced early in her childhood. Her life separated into "the real world" with her Jewish family and "the world that didn't exist" of visits from the birth father she had to keep secret and was taught to disdain. Seventeen years after his visits ended, Ingrid revealed her secret and found the courage to confront her identity.

My Separate Worlds: Daughter of the Holocaust and Evangelical Christianity illuminates the cultural divisions in America and a father and daughter learning to communicate across them.

The Doll, a narrative essay included in the book, recounts a Holocaust survivor's escape from the Nazis and a daughter's struggle to break free from her mother's trauma.

Together they convey a universal message about the Second Generation of any group subjected to atrocity and genocide.