Writer to probe strange Holocaust obsession

Most kids played cowboys and Indians.

Sandi Wisenberg and her sister played Nazis and Jews.

Instead of chasing each other around their house in Houston with makeshift bows and arrows, Sandi and Roz sat quietly in a pink-carpeted, walk-in closet with a full-length mirror hiding from SS officers.

"It was the drama that attracted us," remembers Wisenberg, now a freelance writer, teacher and writing coach, during a phone interview from her Chicago home.

"I think I was too young when I first read 'The Diary of Anne Frank.'"

In a new book of personal essays, "Holocaust Girls: History, Memory & Other Obsessions," the author, known by the pen name S.L. Wisenberg, explores, among other issues of identity, her longtime psychological fascination with the Holocaust and what it means to be a Jewish woman in a post-Holocaust world.

"I am a Holocaust girl," explained Wisenberg, who will read from "Holocaust Girls" at Book Passage in Corte Madera at 7 p.m. Tuesday and will teach a course there on creative writing from 7 to 9 p.m. Sept. 20.

"While a lot of people are fascinated by the Holocaust for more philosophical or political reasons, our attachment is an emotional one. We have our own kind of pain that we link to it."

Wisenberg and her sister could not get excited about a game of battling cowboys and Indians because "that wasn't what we related to. Even though we were these very American kids," their history lay upon another continent.

"We knew if our grandparents and great-grandparents hadn't immigrated in the beginning of the 20th century we probably would have ended up like the people who died in the Holocaust -- or survived," Wisenberg said.

"Holocaust Girls" contains 15 years of essays by the award-winning journalist, who formerly worked for the Miami Herald and has freelanced for dozens of newspapers and magazines, including The New Yorker and The Chicago Reader. Many have previously appeared in such Jewish publications as Tikkun and the Forward as well as in mainstream sources.

Apart from essays about family seders, Hebrew school, her current Yiddish classes, Monica Lewinsky and other Jewish topics, Wisenberg also touches upon issues of the women's movement, wealth, poverty and race.

She considers the essays "autobiographical, but also supplemented by a lot of research and reporting."

In "Holocaust Girls/Closet," Wisenberg writes about her childhood game of hiding from Nazis. She describes how her sister, Roz, tapped on the pink carpet to make the sound of the Nazis' footsteps and whispered, "Listen, do you hear them?" She describes how the Nazis took the girls away to a concentration camp "and let death just come up and kill me like that."

But even when she wasn't playing, the Holocaust was still on her mind. "For years I kept a getaway bag in my closet -- saltines and a notebook, a change of clothes. An alarm clock, so I would know the time," she writes.

Later in 1991, while she was participating in a summer school program for professors and independent scholars at U.C. Berkeley, the Holocaust crept back into her life. Wisenberg watched many German films as part of a course in the German department.

"The Nazis were always there in the background, because it was right before they came to power -- I constantly found myself wondering, 'What happened?' because there was such a vibrant culture before."

That will be the topic of Wisenberg's first novel, which she has been working on "in fits and starts" since then. She also published a book of short stories last year called "The Sweetheart Is In."