My Mother and Me: Making It in New York After Making It Out of Berlin and Beirut

In this witty and insightful memoir, Peter Schrag meditates on the life of his mother, Ilse, who left Germany in 1933 to marry a German Jewish doctor in Lebanon. She left that marriage after five years (1933-1938) and made her way to New York City with her infant son. Together, mother and son built a new life.

At once a rumination on the problems a Jewish refugee family faces in difficult times, an observation of the mysteries of the mother-son bond, and a treatise about what it means to be an American, My Mother and Me is a remarkable family story.