Against All Odds: Holocaust Survivors and the Successful Lives They Made in America (Library of Conservative Thought)

In addition to good health, luck and help from relatives or agencies, he identifies traits which they shared to a varying extent--flexibility, assertiveness, tenacity, intelligence, optimism and a pride that spurred them to engage in purposeful lives. From Publishers Weekly The special refugee community of 140,000 Holocaust survivors who by 1953 had immigrated to the U.S. Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. is the subject of this admirably comprehensive study by Helmreich, chairman of the sociology department of City College of New York and a child of survivors who himself shares their acute concern that the Holocaust not be forgotten. . While he notes that some never recovered from their ordeals, the moving, psychologically revealing first-person accounts Helmreich cites contribute to this impressive analysis of the surprising number who did. The author reviews the national origins of survivors, and where and under what conditions they settled, worked and adapted to t

Against All Odds is the first comprehensive look at the 140,000 Jewish Holocaust survivors who came to America and the lives they have made here. What emerges is a picture that is sharply different from the stereotypical image of survivors as people who are chronically depressed, anxious, and fearful.This intimate, enlightening work explores questions about prevailing over hardship and adversity: how people who have gone through such experiences pick up the threads of their lives; where they obtain the strength and spirit to go on; and, finally, what lessdns the rest of us can learn about overcoming tragedy.. William Helmreich writes of their experiences beginning with their first arriva