Written with brutal honesty and compassion The Butcher's Daughter embraces the beauty, complexity and resilience of the human spirit. But the war followed them to America, where their growing daughter had to learn to live with the emotional aftermath of horrors she didnt understand. This section also describes Grende's week in Wannsee, Germany, where, with other descendents of survivors and perpetrators of the Third Reich, she seeks to confront the past and lay demons to rest. Aaron and Helen Grende were Polish Jews who survived World War II by hiding and fighting in the forest. It describes the years after her father died and her ongoing troubled relationship with her mother. Her parents survived in the countryside as partisans. Section three (Afterwards) recounts her parents' post-War attempts to rebuild their lives, first in Poland, then in Germany. Florence Grende was born in Europe at the close of World War 2. Using her father's post-War testimonial outlining his partisan activities, as well as research and bits of stories told her, Grende reimagines, with gripping imagery, both of her parents' survival struggle.  Section two (Der Melchome) shifts to her family's survival in the frozen Polish forests of WWII. Events come alive as she describes in graphic, sensual detail her experiences and conflicts while straddling an immigrant Jewish life in a post-War American world. She begins (Outside, America Waits) by vividly recounting her 1950's and 1960's Bronx life. In short chapters divided into three sections, Grende leads the reader on a journey of discovery and beyond.  A past that, sheltered in shadow, haunted them all. The Butcher's Daughter 'The Butcher's Daughter' has been short-listed for the prestigious 2017 Eric Hoffer Book Award Grand Prize. It rested in her parents' thick silences as they forged on to create a new life in America, ignoring the impact of the past. Heartfelt and spare, a riveting account of what it means to be the daughter of Holocaust survivors.įlorence Grende knew from childhood on that something evil resided in her household, separate from the rages and tears that gripped her parents that evil an entity her parents called Der Melchome, The War.

The Butcher's Daughter by Florence Grende

I'm really interested in how place interacts with the stories we're trying to tell. Those kinds of touchstones are always nice for me. And Huntsville I'm comfortable with obviously.  So the fact that this takes place at Stanford is a place that I'm comfortable with. I often set things in places that I've lived in, to give me some grounding as a writer. YG: I think the similarities are pretty obvious. In some ways, I think that people could say that that parallels your life, but are there also some differences? But overall, really from page one, it felt like a different project.ĬK: It’s Gifty’s story about growing up and becoming a scientist, a journey from growing up in a struggling immigrant family from Ghana in Alabama to becoming an elite research scientist at the nation's top academic institutions. Some of the themes from Homegoing still run through this, the questions about what we make of our lives after we have experienced or been handed down this trauma from the older generations - that's something that I continue to be interested in. This felt like such a different kind of story that I wanted to tell, much quieter. I don't think I was trying to take on another, many-century project again. YAA GYASI: From the beginning, this seemed very clearly to be a story that was going to be a lot more intimate. She talked to Shondaland from her apartment in Brooklyn, where she has been sheltering from the coronavirus.ĬAROLYN KELLOGG: Congratulations on the new novel! Homegoing was this huge epic, and Transcendent Kingdom is much more internal. Gyasi is all right-brain creative, and her family, while Pentecostal, didn’t face the same travails as the family in her novel. Like Gifty, Gyasi is from Ghana and grew up in Huntsville, but their paths split.  Woven into that is the question of faith - she was raised Pentecostal - and the tension between science and belief.  But she’s haunted by her family - her father, gone back to Ghana, and her brother, a star athlete turned addict. She was a poor girl from Huntsville, Alabama who made it to Harvard then Stanford, propelled by her intelligence and will. All along, Gifty is, circuitously, relating the story of her life.

Celan poet