MY AMERICAN DREAM

A memoir chronicles a Jewish family’s escape from Nazi Germany and the challenges of life in the United States.

In 1937, Sommer Feigin was born in Berlin and into perilous circumstances, given the Jewish ancestry of her father, Eric. Despite the increasingly aggressive discrimination by Hitler’s Nazi regime, Eric, a patriot who fought in World War I, remained reluctant to flee. Eventually, he realized that staying in Germany endangered his loved ones, and he arranged for his family to leave Berlin for the United States. It was an extraordinary journey “three-quarters of the way around the world, into the unknown,” as he describes it in a journal that the author didn’t know existed until she was 75 years old. Sommer Feigin recalls that the journal was the key to understanding a “gaping hole in our history.” After a meandering trek through Eastern Europe, Russia, Manchukuo, Korea, and Japan, the family made it to Seattle and settled in Chehalis in Washington state. The author recounts the pains of adjustment with great candor and emotion—they arrived in a new country with little English and less money, and weathered both anti-German and antisemitic sentiment. Sommer Feigen was not quite 3 when she arrived, and longed to become “an authentic American girl, completely assimilated and just like everyone else.” The author skillfully conveys three distinct but interconnected stories in her remembrance—her family’s escape from Germany, her gradual Americanization as a child, and her adult life juggling an advertising career in New York City with the rigors of motherhood. Her life has been admirable as well as eventful—readers will be deeply impressed by Sommer Feigen’s perseverance in the face of remarkable adversity. In addition, her father’s account of the family’s narrow escape from Hitler’s thugs is exhilaratingly dramatic. But most of the recollection is devoted to a detailed report of her life in America, adorned with personal photographs, that reads like a private journal only intended to be shared with her family. As a result, this story will be best appreciated by the author’s circle of loved ones and friends.

An engaging but idiosyncratic account of wartime dangers and an American odyssey.