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
On Sunset
Kathryn Harrison has been on my "to read" list for years. Glad I picked up this slim volume (quick audiobook). Among her ancestors were Jewish merchants from Baghdad who became British citizens and then Americans. Some of her relatives peddled opium in pre-Communist...
A Tale of Love & Darkness
Amos Oz’s memoir starts in pre-independence Jerusalem and ebbs and flows back to Oz’s parents birth countries in Eastern Europe and Russia. Nu, what? Is is Oz’s grandfather’s standard greeting. He’s deeply skeptical of the socialist bent of Zionist, as he worries...
N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth Trilogy
N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth Trilogy The Fifth Season (August 2015) The Obelisk Gate (August 2016) The Stone Sky (August 2017) I probably read this trilogy over the course of six months as I waited for each (popular!) audiobook to become available from the library. I...
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