Stumbling Blocks
by Jennifer Krebs
My book was published in July 2025
Stumbling Blocks: A Second Generation Holocaust Memoir
Paul, Jennifer’s father, was born in Germany in 1928. At age ten, his parents sent him and his older sisters to Belgium just after Kristallnacht. There, they lived for two years with relatives they barely knew. In 1941, Paul’s parents reunited with the children and fled Germany. When Jennifer was born in the 1950s, she was called a lucky girl. She was born at a time of relative peace and safety. But she felt the presence of the people left behind, whose incomplete histories were told in fragments. Was this because no one knew what happened? Or was someone trying to protect her? Stumbling Blocks is Jennifer’s journey to find truth and meaning from the legacy of the Holocaust.
Jennifer Krebs is the author of Stumbling Blocks, a second-generation Holocaust memoir that braids together Jennifer’s story with her father’s. It is a journey to find truth and meaning in the Holocaust legacy. Jennifer has written stories and articles professionally for over a long time. She lives part-time in California and part-time in New York.
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Stumbling Blocks
by Jennifer Krebs
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From On Being Jewish Now: My Father Grew Up on Hitler-Strasse
From JNS: My father may have escaped the Holocaust, but it was me who got stuck.
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Jennifer Krebs’ additional professional and personal interests:
Bookworm Musings
Lost and Wanted
Lost and Wanted, by Nell Freudenberger This book knocked my socks off. I read Freudenberger's first book, a collection of short stories when it first came out. While I'm sure portions of her book reflect actual people she knows or situations that she's been in, she...
The Invisible Bridge
The Invisible Bridge Julie Orringer. This tome reminded me a bit of Gone with the Wind: a love story set with the backdrop of a war, in this case WWII. A good pat of schmaltz. Most of the main characters make it through the war although statistically (according to...
Not in the Club
The Club, by Takis Würger. This is a quick story about a poor orphaned German young man with an aunt in Cambridge. She uses him to infiltrate a secret Cambridge club to seek revenge against the Patriarchy, the upper crust, the Old Boys Club. Not the best book of 2019,...
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