Labour is blossoming or dancing where

The body is not bruised to pleasure soul,

Nor beauty born out of its own despair,

Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.

O chestnut-tree, great rooted blossomer

Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?

O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,

How can we know the dancer from the dance?

W.B. Yeats

How can we know the dancer from the dance is used here

as a metaphor. How can we know the child and adolescent

from the shadows of the Holocaust cast upon her life

through the diverse strands of history and experience.

Through scenes, meditation and commentary, I will attempt

to weave together the accumulated shadows and how they

effected and interacted with other aspects of my life in shaping

an adult sense of being in the world.

Memory being imprecise, is commented upon by Lorca

as being hovered over by imagination and perhaps more

precisely by Proust as “successive states of self and of time

regained”. This brings him close to Freud’s view of conscious

and repressed memory, which seems relevant as I

reconstruct events and aspects of my life where knowledge

gained after initial constructions altered perception of what

was seen and felt. These reconstructions are recalled here,

sometimes in chronological order, sometimes as they are

randomly recalled.

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .1

In The End, In The Beginning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .3

Struggling To Belong . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .13

The Combatant And The Heroine . . . . . . . . . . . .18

Refugees . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .22

My Friend Georgia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .31

Widening Horizons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .34

Contrapuntal Rhythmns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .42

Moving Onward . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .61

My First Trip To Europe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .68

A Decade Of Tangled Threads . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .71

The Wanderers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .86

In Search Of Lost Times . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .97

Back To School . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .105

A Conflicted Choice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .110

From Research To Memoir . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .114

Germany Revisited: Interviews

And Discussions With German Women . . . . . .117

Epilogue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .135

Doris Pfeffer has had a long career as a clinical social worker. She was on the staff of the Jewish Board of Family and Children's Services as a practitioner, supervisor and assistant director of group therapy while conducting a private practice as a psychotherapist.

She taught in two schools of social work— as a member of the part time faculty at Smith College and as an Adjunct Associate Professor at New York University. Later studies at Teachers College involved research among adolescents in New York City, which subsequently led to an international project that informs the last chapter of this book. 
Her life has been inspired by the several musical instruments she has and  continues to play as well as the authors she's read, studied and been most inspired by—namely Proust, Joyce and Freud.