Annette Gendler's Blog

Dear Readers,

I’ve moved my blog to Substack. Please follow me there, check out my Substack home page and subscribe:

I look forward to seeing you there, every Friday!

Annette

The post My Blog Has Moved to Substack! first appeared on Annette Gendler.

The post My Blog Has Moved to Substack! appeared first on Annette Gendler.

I’ve figured out how to bake gluten free challah using Blends by Orly Gluten Free Challah Mix.

I never thought I’d be doing this as I was used to buying ready-baked challah from a kosher bakery. However, once I developed celiac and could no longer eat regular yeast dough, my husband found a bakery that specialized in kosher ready-made challah. Turns out, unfortunately, that in order to say Hamotzi (the blessing over bread), the challah needs to contain oat flour as that’s one of the grains ment...

On her Instagram account, my wonderful book designer Melinda Martin put together this short tour of how we did the book design for Natalie and the Nazi Soldiers. This deserves a blog post, particularly here, where readers might look for a glimpse behind the scenes of this children’s book. So here goes:

First came the character development, particularly that of Natalie, the protagonist.

To create this character, my talented illustrator Ste Johnson did a few sketches. Finding the right illustrat...

I have a weakness for chewy treats, and I love the taste of tahini.

It’s no wonder this recipe has become a favorite treat of mine. The sesame seeds in this recipe provide just the right amount of chewiness, and the tahini an interesting taste. To boot, these blondies keep well; I recently brought a box of them along on a hiking trip with my daughter. The blondies were a delicious pick-me-up at several picnic spots. Digging that box out of my backpack was like a bit of magic, and thankfully the...

I first learned about Gershom Scholem when I read Thomas Sparr’s excellent portrait of German Jerusalem: The Remarkable Life of a German-Jewish Neighborhood in the Holy City.  (If you’re interested in how modern Jerusalem came about and the group of German intellectuals who made the neighborhood of Rehavia their home, I highly recommend that book.)

Gershom Scholem was not an ardent political Zionist, and he grew up in a rather assimilated and well established Jewish family in Berlin.

Yet, in 192...

Today is Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day),

when in Israel sirens sound at 10 a.m. For two minutes, the entire country stands still to observe the memory of the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis during World War II.

An hour after the siren, the “Unto Every Person There is a Name” ceremony at the Knesset (Israeli parliament) begins, as lawmakers read out the names of Holocaust victims.

Facilitated by Yad Vashem’s database of victims, Jewish organizations all over the world participate...

My new (and first) children’s book is out!

May I present: Natalie and the Nazi Soldiers, the story of a hidden child in France during the Holocaust, based on my mother-in-law’s life.

How long did it take to write? Create? Publish?

I know I’ll be asked this question in interviews or even in ordinary conversations. So I did a little research, because, believe it or not, the origins of a book are not necessarily easily to pinpoint.

However, I know exactly when I got the idea for the book:

Back in ...

Meet the town of Tykocin in northeast Poland, a shtetl if there ever was one.

Tykocin is pretty much as it was in August 1941, when German Einsatzgruppen obliterated its entire Jewish population of about 2,000 people by shooting them into massive pits dug out in the adjacent forest of Lupochowo. They murdered them after inflicting all kinds of cruel humiliations on them. Hearing about those does me in.

This erstwhile Jewish market stall is now a bistro in Tykocin, Poland. (Google photo)

In the ...

This low stone wall marks the circumference of the barn in Jedwabne, where more than 300 Jews were burned to death in July 1941.

After our visit to the Warsaw Jewish Cemetery , the first stop on our tour of Holocaust sites in Poland was the little town of Jedwabne, a shtetl in the northeast of Poland. In this town, in 1941, at least half the population had been Jewish for centuries.

Nevertheless, on July 10, 1941, as the Germans were taking over northeastern Poland, the Polish residents...

Our November tour of the sites of Jewish history and the Holocaust in Poland and Lithuania began with a visit to the Warsaw Jewish Cemetery.

With more than 250,000 marked graves, plus two mass graves from the 1940s Warsaw ghetto, it is one of the largest Jewish cemeteries still in use today.

A grave from 2009

My friend Rivka Schiller did this photo essay of the Warsaw Jewish Cemetery for me a few years ago, and so I had high expectations of what we would see. I was not disappointed.

I love ex...