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Second generation survivor uses humor to cope with trauma
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BY: Lila Hanft Staff Reporter
My Parents Went Through the Holocaust and All I got Was This Lousy T-Shirt. By S. Hanala Stadner. Matter Inc., an imprint of Seven Locks Press. 2006. 391 pp. $24.95.
At first, it’s hard to know what to make of Hanala Stadner, author of My Parents Went Through the Holocaust and All I got Was This Lousy T-Shirt. Does she realize the title of her book is offensive to some people? Is she as superficial as her celebrity photos suggest? Is she making fun of Holocaust survivors?
I discovered the answers to those questions when I interviewed the personable, glamorous 51-year-old Stadner in a booth at the back of Corky & Lenny’s last week, shortly before her book signing at Barnes & Noble.
The answers are, respectively: yes, she realizes the title offends some people; no, she’s not the walking Barbie doll she appears to be; and no, she is not making jokes at the expense of survivors.
Despite her polished surface, Stadner is a puzzle whose parts don’t always seem to fit together. She’s a popular L.A. fitness instructor, a television personality, a former alcohol and drug abuser sober more than 20 years, a chemical dependency counselor, a comedic writer, and a sought-after speaker on the second generation Holocaust survivor lecture circuit. Once you hear her speak or you read her book, the pieces all fall into place.
Stadner grew up before anyone had done studies or even spoke in whispers about the now well-documented syndromes that can occur when the survivors of trauma and loss become parents. “My parents survived Hitler. I survived my parents,” Stadner writes in the book’s opening.
As a child, Stadner thought there was something wrong with her — nothing she did or said or wanted had any significance in the face of her parents’ history. When Stadner told her mother she was scared of school, her mother responded, “‘You’re scared? Vhat, is a Nazi chasing you?’” Later Stadner understood that the shadow of the Holocaust loomed not just over her parents’ lives, but over hers as well.
“I wasn’t crammed in a boxcar headed for Auschwitz,” she explains. “I came later. I grew up in a bungalow in Canada watching ‘Captain Kangaroo’ and eating Alpha-Bits. Yet, if you and I were to speak for five minutes, I’d work into the conversation that my parents are Holocaust survivors.”
Newly married when the Nazis came to take their families away, Stadner’s parents escaped to the woods, where for months on end they hid from the Nazis with other young adults. Throughout the book, Stadner reveals specific stories rich in tragedy and irony from of her parent’s life-in-hiding:
“‘Oy… Hanala, you know da vay you love babies? Vell…’ she sighs, needing strength to go on, ‘I loved my brodder’s children like dey vere my own, and because I couldn’t save dem, dey got chopped up mit an ax, what can I tell you?’ Ma gets up and starts with the dishes.
“Like a hit-and-run driver who doesn’t realize she’s flattened someone, Ma hits and cleans. She’s oblivious of the impact. She leaves a heap of emotional rubble without a speck of guilt. … One minute her niece and nephew are being axed; the next, she’s dashing off like the white knight from the Ajax commercial, brandishing a shmatteh. … I’m frozen. I’ve been Mummy-fied. Can’t talk.”
Stadner is describing the “secondary traumatization” often experienced by the children of Holocaust survivors. According to the American Academy of Experts in Traumatic Stress, children of Holocaust survivors are at higher risk for psychiatric symptoms, including depression, anxiety, nightmares, emotional numbing, irritability, and hypervigilance.
If you were to hold Stadner’s book up against a clinical description of secondary trauma, you’d find a direct correspondence. But Stadner’s version would be funnier. She moves briskly through the symptoms and consequences brought on by life with her parents. She gives pithy accounts of her food addiction, agoraphobia, alcohol and drug addiction, and a predilection for men who belittle and lie to her n without sparing a word for self-pity.
Stadner sees comedy as the antidote to trauma n particularly the secondary trauma which is inadvertently thrust upon you by the people who are supposed to care for and comfort you. (“Tragedy + time = comedy” declares her website Traumedy Central, which is also the title of her new television show on the new Jewish Life TV network.)
Which brings us back to the title of the book n is it funny? Stadner says she didn’t anticipate anyone would think the title was serious, but that she has had interesting dialogues with people who do find the title disturbing. “Once they begin reading the book, they understand” that given her self-deprecating humor, the joke is about her as much as her parents, Stadner explains. The book jacket blurbs testify to how much other second generation survivors appreciate Stadner’s candor and irreverence; after all, she’s giving a voice to all those things that could never be talked about, the elephant in the room no one was supposed to notice.
Long before the book’s end, Stadner has accepted her mother’s mishegass. As we sit in Corky & Lenny’s, she recites some of her mother’s funniest lines, until her sister, Akron resident Sylvia Levinson, is in stitches. She confesses to Hanala that reading the book helped her through the grief after their mother died. “Really?” says Stadner, obviously touched. “You describe exactly what Ma was really like,” Sylvia replies. “It helped me remember.”
lhanft@cjn.org
At first, it’s hard to know what to make of Hanala Stadner, author of My Parents Went Through the Holocaust and All I got Was This Lousy T-Shirt. Does she realize the title of her book is offensive to some people? Is she as superficial as her celebrity photos suggest? Is she making fun of Holocaust survivors?
I discovered the answers to those questions when I interviewed the personable, glamorous 51-year-old Stadner in a booth at the back of Corky & Lenny’s last week, shortly before her book signing at Barnes & Noble.
The answers are, respectively: yes, she realizes the title offends some people; no, she’s not the walking Barbie doll she appears to be; and no, she is not making jokes at the expense of survivors.
Despite her polished surface, Stadner is a puzzle whose parts don’t always seem to fit together. She’s a popular L.A. fitness instructor, a television personality, a former alcohol and drug abuser sober more than 20 years, a chemical dependency counselor, a comedic writer, and a sought-after speaker on the second generation Holocaust survivor lecture circuit. Once you hear her speak or you read her book, the pieces all fall into place.
Stadner grew up before anyone had done studies or even spoke in whispers about the now well-documented syndromes that can occur when the survivors of trauma and loss become parents. “My parents survived Hitler. I survived my parents,” Stadner writes in the book’s opening.
As a child, Stadner thought there was something wrong with her — nothing she did or said or wanted had any significance in the face of her parents’ history. When Stadner told her mother she was scared of school, her mother responded, “‘You’re scared? Vhat, is a Nazi chasing you?’” Later Stadner understood that the shadow of the Holocaust loomed not just over her parents’ lives, but over hers as well.
“I wasn’t crammed in a boxcar headed for Auschwitz,” she explains. “I came later. I grew up in a bungalow in Canada watching ‘Captain Kangaroo’ and eating Alpha-Bits. Yet, if you and I were to speak for five minutes, I’d work into the conversation that my parents are Holocaust survivors.”
Newly married when the Nazis came to take their families away, Stadner’s parents escaped to the woods, where for months on end they hid from the Nazis with other young adults. Throughout the book, Stadner reveals specific stories rich in tragedy and irony from of her parent’s life-in-hiding:
“‘Oy… Hanala, you know da vay you love babies? Vell…’ she sighs, needing strength to go on, ‘I loved my brodder’s children like dey vere my own, and because I couldn’t save dem, dey got chopped up mit an ax, what can I tell you?’ Ma gets up and starts with the dishes.
“Like a hit-and-run driver who doesn’t realize she’s flattened someone, Ma hits and cleans. She’s oblivious of the impact. She leaves a heap of emotional rubble without a speck of guilt. … One minute her niece and nephew are being axed; the next, she’s dashing off like the white knight from the Ajax commercial, brandishing a shmatteh. … I’m frozen. I’ve been Mummy-fied. Can’t talk.”
Stadner is describing the “secondary traumatization” often experienced by the children of Holocaust survivors. According to the American Academy of Experts in Traumatic Stress, children of Holocaust survivors are at higher risk for psychiatric symptoms, including depression, anxiety, nightmares, emotional numbing, irritability, and hypervigilance.
If you were to hold Stadner’s book up against a clinical description of secondary trauma, you’d find a direct correspondence. But Stadner’s version would be funnier. She moves briskly through the symptoms and consequences brought on by life with her parents. She gives pithy accounts of her food addiction, agoraphobia, alcohol and drug addiction, and a predilection for men who belittle and lie to her n without sparing a word for self-pity.
Stadner sees comedy as the antidote to trauma n particularly the secondary trauma which is inadvertently thrust upon you by the people who are supposed to care for and comfort you. (“Tragedy + time = comedy” declares her website Traumedy Central, which is also the title of her new television show on the new Jewish Life TV network.)
Which brings us back to the title of the book n is it funny? Stadner says she didn’t anticipate anyone would think the title was serious, but that she has had interesting dialogues with people who do find the title disturbing. “Once they begin reading the book, they understand” that given her self-deprecating humor, the joke is about her as much as her parents, Stadner explains. The book jacket blurbs testify to how much other second generation survivors appreciate Stadner’s candor and irreverence; after all, she’s giving a voice to all those things that could never be talked about, the elephant in the room no one was supposed to notice.
Long before the book’s end, Stadner has accepted her mother’s mishegass. As we sit in Corky & Lenny’s, she recites some of her mother’s funniest lines, until her sister, Akron resident Sylvia Levinson, is in stitches. She confesses to Hanala that reading the book helped her through the grief after their mother died. “Really?” says Stadner, obviously touched. “You describe exactly what Ma was really like,” Sylvia replies. “It helped me remember.”
lhanft@cjn.org
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