Against All Odds: Holocaust Survivors and the Successful Lives They Made in America, Edition 2

William B. Helmreich

Jul 2017 · Routledge

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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. William Helmreich writes of their experiences beginning with their first arrival in the United States: the mixed reactions they encountered from American Jews who were not always eager to receive them; their choices about where to live in America; and their efforts in finding marriage partners with whom they felt most comfortable most often other survivors.In preparation, Helmreich spent more than six years traveling the United States, listening to the personal stories of hundreds of survivors, and examining more than 15,000 pages of data as well as new material from archives that have never before been available to create this remarkable, groundbreaking work. 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.

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William Benno Helmreich was a sociologist and scholar of Judaism. He was born on August 25, 1945 in Zurich, Switzerland. His parents emigrated to the United States in 1945 and settled on the Upper West side of Manhattan. He attended Yeshiva University and did his graduate work at Washington University in St. Louis. He taught and became a professor at City University and the City University of New York's Graduate Center. He went on to serve as the longtime chairman of sociology at City College. He wrote or edited 18 books. His first book was, The Black Crusaders: A Case Study of a Black Militant Organization. It was based on the study he did for his dissertation. He wrote a memoir, Wake Up, Wake Up to Do the Work of the Creator. Others works on Jewish life and education included, The World of the Yeshiva: An Intimate Portrait of Orthodox Judaism, The Enduring Community: The Jews of Newark and MetroWest, The World of the Yeshiva: An Intimate Portrait of Orthodox Jewry, and Against All Odds: Holocaust Survivors and the Successful Lives They Made in America. He walked every block in New York City, all 6,163 miles. It began as something he did, as a child, with his father. These walks were the inspiration for several of his books, The New York Nobody Knows: Walking 6,000 Miles in the City, The Manhattan Nobody Knows: An Urban Walking Guide, and several other walking guides covering Brooklyn, Staten Island, and Queens. He died on March 28, 2020 at the age of 74, from the coronavirus.