Cultural Autobiography

Cultural Autobiography of a Second Generation Survivor

This is not the first time I have sat down to write my autobiography. What feels different now is the willingness to see my life through a wider lens, not only what happened to me, but how history, power, and culture shaped what was possible and who I became.

Almost any part of my story could be read this way. Even my choice of cancer treatment was not purely personal. It was shaped by access, by circumstance, by structures that made certain options available to me and not to others. Our lives unfold inside systems, whether we name them or not.

For this telling, I turn toward the forces that formed me most deeply: the legacy of the Holocaust, inherited grief, Israeli national identity, and the cultural expectations of masculinity and survival, and eventually my turn to art in response to it all.

This is my cultural autobiography as a member of the second generation Holocaust survivor, shaped not by camps, but by inherited silence.

What I Inherited Before I Had Words

I was driving a Jeep in the Golan Heights.
My M16 lay across the back seat.
A herd of sheep crossed the dirt road, and I slowed the engine.

My father sat beside me.

Out of nowhere, he said, “That’s how we walked.”

He meant: to the gas chamber.

His words landed like a thunderclap. Heavy. Unprepared for. Final.

He had almost never spoken about the Holocaust. The silence around it had more presence than any story. But in that moment, something cracked open. I caught a glimpse of his shame, his survivor’s guilt, the humiliation that had lived inside him for decades.

I looked at him, stunned. I said nothing.

I wish I had. I wish I had turned toward him instead of inward. But I was still armored then. I knew how to drive a military Jeep in contested territory. I did not yet know how to sit beside my father’s pain.

That moment has stayed with me. It is part of my cultural autobiography — what I inherited long before I had language.

Inheriting Silence

I was born in Be’er Sheva in 1960, part of the first generation raised in a young nation that felt permanently alert. My parents were Holocaust survivors. I did not experience what they endured. But I lived inside its atmosphere. I am part of the second generation — children who grew up in the echo.

Trauma did not arrive as narrative. It arrived as weather.

It shaped my sense of safety. My relationship to anger. My feeling of belonging in the world. Because my parents rarely spoke of what they survived, the silence itself became authoritative. Not speaking carried power.

Power lived outside us in war and national vulnerability. It also lived inside our home, in what was never said.

For years I interpreted my emotional restraint as personal limitation. Only later did I begin to understand it as adaptation. Children adapt to the climates they are born into. I adapted to a history of genocide and survival that preceded me.

A Nation Shaped by Survival

The culture around me reinforced what I absorbed at home.

Growing up in Israel meant living with the sense that danger was never entirely past. It entered school, language, humor, expectation. Strength was measured in restraint. Emotional control was not just a personality trait. It was a civic virtue.

Military service deepened this orientation. Hierarchy, obedience, risk. Fear was managed, not named. Action carried more authority than reflection.

In the Paratroopers, endurance was everything. Jumping from planes with heavy gear. Marching through cold nights. Serving as a combat medic under fire. The message was simple: move forward. Do not hesitate. Do not collapse.

I was surrounded by different kinds of Israeli men — kibbutz kids, religious soldiers, city boys — all performing the same toughness. To belong, you held yourself in.

The unspoken trauma of my parents braided itself together with a society that prized stoicism. Together, they narrowed the space in which I could safely feel or speak.

I learned to do rather than disclose. To hold rather than share.

For decades, I thought this was simply my personality.

Now I see it as cultural inheritance.

Distance as Breathing Room

Leaving Israel for the United States was not only practical. It was psychological.

Without realizing it, I stepped out of a boiling pot into a wider landscape. The constant alertness softened. I could work, build stability, and pause. Immigration did not erase my past. But it changed my relationship to it.

For the first time, I could look back instead of react forward.

In that slowing down, questions surfaced. And eventually, art.

Heat, Glass, and Memory

Art did not enter my life as a hobby. It arrived as necessity.

After years of inherited silence and cultural restraint, I needed a language that did not require immediate explanation. Working with hot glass became that language.

I would place colored glass tiles side by side. Then the kiln would climb to 1700 degrees Fahrenheit. At that temperature, edges softened. Hard surfaces began to yield.

When I opened the kiln, the glass was pliable. Twistable. Alive.

Sometimes I think that heat did what silence never could. It allowed what was rigid in me to bend.

I shaped luminous forms and mounted them on plexiglass and aluminum panels. Color moved across horizontal landscapes. Light traveled.

Unconsciously at first, I was recreating motion across terrain. My father had once walked toward annihilation. My work moved in the opposite direction — toward light.

The exhibition The Train from Auschwitz — A Journey from Shame to Self Realization, installed at the Harriet and Kenneth Kupferberg Holocaust Center in Queens, became a physical expression of that reversal. Panels of fused glass lined the walls. Video projections shifted at the corners. Visitors walked beside fields of color that suggested movement without destination.

It was not only about history. It was about transformation.

In the studio, reflection became physical. I arranged glass. Waited for heat. Responded to what emerged. Shame, grief, curiosity, longing — emotions stored in the body found form.

Art did not erase the past. But it allowed the past to become part of a journey rather than a prison.

👉 I describe that process more fully in From Engineering to Emotion: How My Fused Glass Art Began, where heat, timing, and surrender become part of the work itself.

From Survival to Conscious Living

I inherited trauma before I had language. I internalized a culture that equated strength with emotional control. I also benefited from opportunities — immigration, stability, creative freedom — that reshaped what was possible.

My life is not a private story. It is part of a larger one about how history enters the body, how culture shapes identity, and how silence is carried by the second generation.

For years I believed survival meant endurance.

Now I understand survival can also mean transformation.

What we inherit does not disappear. But it can be reshaped.

March 2026