Inheritance
Love, Loss, and the Legacy of the Holocaust
The detailed family memoir Inheritance goes to great lengths to tell remarkable World War II stories of resilience and courage.
Charlie Scheidt’s immersive memoir Inheritance concerns a family’s tumultuous World War II past.
After the passing of his mother, Scheidt sifted through passports, letters, photographs, and official documents bearing the names of the Scheidt family. With the help of his friend and guide, Kat, Scheidt then traveled across Europe, tracing the paths of his mother’s and father’s families during World War I and II, hoping to understand their lives as refugees in Switzerland, France, and the United States. Weaving between these research experiences and the family’s past, the book seeks new meanings and connections to their roots and religion.
This book’s dual timeline is handled well, with natural transitions, and valuable context is included throughout. Indeed, epiphanies abound as Scheidt visits the locations where his family lived in Borken, Germany, and Paris, France. Historical context is also included to flesh out rising antisemitic tensions in Germany prior to the Nazi takeover.
Despite its blend of the factual and the personal, the book’s language is academic on the whole. Its contextual questions are answered with clarity, though. And though the narrative sometimes resembles textbook writing with its emphasis on minutiae, its quite personal interjections have a humanizing effect, with Scheidt inserting his interpretations of what his parents or family members may have felt or thought at the time of particular events to flesh them out—and with the admission “My many years of work on my family’s story had taught me that capturing even these seemingly insignificant details is a loving gesture, a way to hold on to the individual humanity of those who are no longer here.” Thus, the book works to encapsulate every aspect of the family members’ lives.
The book’s plethora of names, dates, relationships, and locations sometimes overwhelms its momentum, with ancillary aids including family trees, personal photographs, chapter notes, an index, and bibliographic information used to organize these voluminous details. While its breadth of information remains sometimes excessive, the comprehensive approach well reflects the book’s guiding sense that “the children of refugees always bear a particular burden—they carry the unspoken imperative to survive precisely because so much has been sacrificed and lost.”
A meticulous, intimate memoir, Inheritance is about a search for meaning in the past and the process of resurrecting stories that should never be forgotten.
Reviewed by
N.T. McQueen
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
