Grace Feuerverger was a survivor before she was born. Her riveting memoir Winter Light is the chronicle of the miracle of a life she forged for herself out of the ashes of her inherited trauma.
Years before her birth, both Feuerverger’s parents underwent unspeakable horror in a Nazi concentration camp, from which they emerged layered in unacknowledged psychic stresses they tried to bury in the new life they sought to build in Montreal and their three children. The middle child, born a few years after the brother delivered in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, and fewer years before doted-upon little sister, Feuerverger always felt like the family interloper. She was the target of mother’s anger, an anger from which her father was incapable of protecting her. She might have succumbed to a sense of displacement, of despairing disbelief in her own self-worth, but her friendship with a Montreal neighbor provided the window through which she was able to escape.
Feuerverger formed a deep friendship with a local girl, whose loving, close-knit family provided respite from the swirling chaos of abuse and melancholy that dominated her own. They became a kind of surrogate family, a French Canadian working class family with a bright, nonjudgmental outlook, and introduced her to vast worlds beyond the claustrophobic pain of her parents’ home.
It was, however, Feuerverger’s own astute intelligence, her facility with language, and her remarkable curiosity about all kinds of cultures and people that actually gave her the key to her own salvation., Out of her fascination with the wonders she encountered in her new friend’s life – from French language to Christian premises to food to global perspectives – she found her own future that led her to McGill University and from there to places she had hardly dreamed of reaching. Further studies in Toronto, at Berkeley, in Perugia, Italy, in Jerusalem, and in a small Palestinian and Jewish village in Israel led to her becoming a linguist, a professor, an expert in conflict resolution, and a member of the Canadian Commission for UNESCO.
Most poignantly, by escaping her the prison of her parents’ psychoses, she was able to find a deep, rewarding love shared with a man who recognizes her strengths, applauds her successes, and knows better than to seek to save her. To come out of a childhood where love was repaid with recrimination and to find her way into a career of giving and conciliating, to find the ability to love and be loved by husband, students, family with equal generosity and gratitude . . . those are achievements from which we should all take inspiration!
