Family Escape Research Articles

“It is not to think that real strangers, as you are, give us so much love”: An Austrian Pen Pal's Journey to a Safe Haven in the United States

Abstract This article traces Marianne Winter's unique immigration journey as an eighteen-year-old Jewish Austrian refugee. Pivotal to the family's escape was the epistolary friendship that developed in early 1935 between Marianne and her American pen pal Jane Bomberger. When Jane's father Max learned of the Winter family's persecution, he generously provided the required affidavit to ensure their safe passage to the United States. Six of the remaining letters from Marianne to Jane, additional family documents, and interviews with Marianne contextualize her upbringing in Vienna and her family's immigration story within a larger sociocultural and historical framework. The article examines how Marianne's youth, participation in competitive swimming at the Viennese sports club Hakoah, education at Eugenie Schwarzwald's Frauenoberschule, and apprenticeship as a dressmaker shaped her identity and enabled her to face the many challenges of forced immigration from her homeland. The article additionally explores how other members of the Winter family, especially her brother Stefan, experienced the Holocaust, immigration, and their new lives in the United States.

Mahmoud Darwish: Literature and the Politics of Palestinian Identity

Mahmoud Darwish: Literature and the Politics of Palestinian Identity

Pushing Boundaries: My Personal and Scientific Journey

This autobiographical narrative offers a brief account of my journey and adventures in condensed matter physics (a.k.a. solid state physics) and some of the personal events that shaped my life and my career: my early years in Europe, my family's escape from the Nazis, growing up in Cuba, the difficult road into a field that was essentially closed to women, a personal disaster that knocked the wind out of my sails for more than a decade, and my return to a successful career in physics. In closing, I argue that, although we have made remarkable progress, we know but a thimble-full in our inexhaustible search for an understanding of the laws of nature.

Mighty Upheaval on the Minnesota Frontier: Violence, War, and Death in Dakota and Missionary Christianity

Stephen Riggs, Presbyterian missionary to the Dakota Indians, anxiously awaited a letter from the American Tract Society. He expected a reply about his proposed account of the recent war between the Dakotas and Euro-American settlers in Minnesota. After more than two centuries of contact between Dakotas and Europeans, and later Americans, relations had broken down entirely. Confined to reservations with some of their people starving, disgruntled Dakota warriors attacked villages and outlying cabins across southern Minnesota. Over several weeks in August and September 1862, they killed at least five hundred settlers and depopulated as many as twenty-three counties. The Reverend Riggs and his family barely escaped. Like so many Minnesota settlers, their home and possessions were destroyed. Military reinforcements eventually stopped the Dakotas' progress, compelling some to surrender and others to escape west to the plains. When hostilities ended, Riggs served as an interpreter in the negotiations over captives and at military tribunals organized to deal with detained Dakota fighters. He later visited Dakotas incarcerated in prison camps, paying special attention to the more than three hundred men sentenced to death for their part in the uprising. In light of his dramatic experience, Riggs proposed an account of his family's escape, along with details of the Dakota warriors' capture and confinement, in order to share how God had worked through this “mighty upheaval.”

An example of rapid evolution of complex limit cycles

In the current article we study complex cycles of higher multiplicity in a specific polynomial family of holomorphic foliations in the complex plane. The family in question is a perturbation of an exact polynomial one-form giving rise to a foliation by Riemann surfaces. In this setting, a complex cycle is defined as a nontrivial element of the fundamental group of a leaf from the foliation. In addition to that, we introduce the notion of a multi-fold cycle and show that in our example there exists a limit cycle of any multiplicity. Furthermore, such a cycle gives rise to a one-parameter family of cycles continuously depending on the perturbation parameter. As the parameter decreases in absolute value, the cycles from the continuous family escape from a very large subdomain of the complex plane.

A World in Reverse

Maritza Molina is a Cuban-born artist who has lived in Miami since the mid-1980s. Gaining access to her work requires understanding the relationship between her early life in Havana, the circumstances of her move to Miami, and the social complexities affecting Cubans locally and abroad. It is impossible to reflect on her work outside her cultural scope as her work does not deal with essentialisms, but departs from the premise of being socially contextual. Encompassing photography, performance, and video, her work draws from three main influences: the ambiguous relationship between family traditions, her ritualized connection to nature, and the traumatic experiences suffered during her family's escape from Cuba. Music has been a strong influence in Molina's life. Growing up in a family of classical musicians (her father is a classical guitarist and her mother an opera singer), Molina spent most of her childhood around concert halls, street performances, and family gatherings where musicians, artists, and family friends would get together to perform throughout the night. When she later moved to Miami, it was her lather's artistic network that gave the young Maritza the support she needed to pursue a career in the visual arts. Along with String Resonance (an exhibition she curated featuring thirty-one artists), Molina's 2002 photographic piece, Dreaming of a Composition #1, was featured in the 2002 Sun Waves Guitar Fest in Miami which was sponsored by the Guitar Foundation of America, directed by Molina's father. Dreaming of a Composition #1 displays the artist lying down on a concrete floor donning a short nightgown with a day-dreamy expression on her face, surrounded by guitars, a cello, and music sheets. The cello represents the artist's early music lessons as well as childhood memories of a world of music--an homage to her father. In the photograph, all instruments lack their strings. The strings are all tangled up near the artist's hands, and she tries to untangle them, as if trying to sort out her childhood memories. For the artist, the piece symbolizes a return to the basics, to a primal stage, as suggested by the ground of concrete. This barren stage is the foundation for the composition of a work of music and a work of art. Though Molina's main intention is to honor the sharing of music between father and daughter, it is also a more general tribute to the passage of tradition and heritage from one generation to the next. Additionally, there is also a reference to the more formalist perspective linking the physical female form to that of the string instrument--a harkening back to many male artists' interpretations throughout the ages. Though Molina's early experiences of her country suggest a happy childhood in a creative and receptive environment, her early experiences with political turmoil were deeply traumatic during the months anticipating her family's escape from Cuba. When her father's plans to flee Cuba were leaked to the authorities, her family became a target of severe persecution at the hands of authorities and neighbors alike--even living under house arrest and constant threats. She recalls recurrent nightmares over the years in which she saw the faces of men outside her window and heard their voices screaming death threats to her father while they brutally pounded on the front door of the family home. After fleeing with her parents and siblings to Miami, Molina's life was strained with other sets of challenges. So shy that some thought her mute, the young Maritza, at a loss between malls and streets jammed with cars and people (polarities apparently too chaotic to swallow) struggled to adapt to the American lifestyle. Fortunately, her parent's connections in both music and visual arts eventually afforded Maritza a comfort zone. Miami offered both the economic opportunities and the familiarity of being among other Cubans while most of the traditions of old Havana were preserved. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Bruised (2001-2002) is a 40-minute installation/performance in which the artist lays on a bed made of pointed high heels from numerous shoes. …

A Multidisciplinary Approach to Literacy through Picture Books and Drama

dine explains that adolescents live in a society where [tjhis nonverbal and highly visual culture is expanding rapidly as a result of the communication revolution (634). Intensely visual media such as text messaging, video games, television, and computers are ubiquitous in students' everyday lives. In a world where students increasingly engage with visual texts, picture books represent a valuable addition to the secondary curriculum. Many picture books today explore complex themes and address topics appropriate for secondary school students (see sidebar). These books require readers to use both visual and print literacies to and interpret them, as the illustrations and text form an artistic unit that is stronger than either of them would be alone (Stewig 9). Indeed, Lee Galda and Kathy G. Short assert that [illustrations are not an extension of the text that simply reinforce the meanings of the words, but are necessary for comprehension (506). Drawing on their extensive visual knowledge, readers have the potential to gain a deeper sensitivity to the characters' emotions and intentions, and greater insight into the issues and struggles portrayed in the books, than may be possible when reading the text alone. Adolescent readers can enhance their understanding of even the most complex social issues when reading picture books. Selection is a critical factor when bringing picture books into secondary classrooms. Not all picture books are appropriate for secondary students' critical reading and interpretation of diverse perspectives. Teachers must consider the complexity of text and illustration interactions and the level of sophistication of the themes when making decisions about which picture books to use. In this article, we argue that picture books offer a medium for teaching visual and critical literacy across the curriculum in secondary classrooms, and we present a unit on World War II that integrates objectives from the theatre arts, social studies, and art curricula. Students in grades 10 to 12 completed the unit in their theatre arts class in the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador. Their learning in all the subject areas was enriched through dramatic response two books: Roberto Innocenti's Rose Blanche, a partially fictional book, illustrated in oils, that explores the perspective of a German child caught risking her life to help German Jews; and William Kaplan's One More Border: The True Story of One Family's Escape from War-Torn Europe, which tells the story of the author's cape from the Nazis on a journey that took him across Asia and eventually to Cornwall, Ontario, Canada. Chalk and pastel illustrations, together with period photos and documents, add to One More Boder's realism and historical accuracy. Through the study of these historical picture books, students developed a deeper appreciation for the difficult decisions made by individuals living in Europe during World War II. The books helped students to understand both the public events that we usually label 'history' and the private struggles that have characterized the human

"The Pains I Took to Save My/His Family": Escape Accounts by a Huguenot Mother and Daughter after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes

Before dawn on an April day in 1687, six children of the Protestant noble family Robillard de Champagne slipped among the wine casks belowdecks of an English eighteen-tonner and made their escape from La Rochelle to Devon. Their mother and eldest brother traced the same route to exile in July. Ten months later the father fled overland to Holland. The baby sister was left behind. The pattern of the Champagne family's escape was, for all its drama and complexity, unexceptional. Protestant fugitives in the era of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes commonly emigrated in family fragments, children preceding parents, women acting independently of their fathers and husbands, over multiple routes, creating permanent separations because some family members fled while others did not. Perhaps as many as 150,000 Huguenots left France during the 1680s in every imaginable configuration of kin and nonkin, grouped and solitary. The escape permutations were sketched, in microcosm, on board the ships that carried as contrabandJacques Fontaine, a ministry student from Saintonge, and Jean Migault, a schoolmaster from