CITIZEN MOM

In Germany she enjoyed her friends and won a ping pong championship. She loved plum kuchen and sauerbraten and skiing in the Alps. When she arrived in America, she tossed her dirndls in favor of stylish American clothes. She visited the Grand Canyon and enjoyed Las Vegas. She married and raised a daughter to delight in both. As a child in Germany, her father had raised her to be a German whose religion was Jewish. When Hitler threatened her life in 1938 and she was forced to leave her country, she emigrated to America and became an American whose religion was Jewish. Somehow this belief was not always successful in either country. Citizen Mom is the story of her and her daughter's struggles to become American girls whose religion is Jewish as they navigate through the end of World War II, delight in the idyllic fifties, encounter the tumultuous sixties, and figure out how to make life work from that point forward. Citizen Mom is resilient, creative, disciplined, sometimes unforgiving, but always grounded. She is fierce in sharing with her daughter the beauty of her European roots and her earnest desire to always "fit in." Her daughter must learn to accept or deny her doctrines, but always to love her.