Wearing a tight black skirt, roach- killer boots, and teased hair, Zosha runs with her junior high school’s fast crowd, circa 1960. For Zosha, life is about fitting in, stepping out, making it with the handsome Puerto Rican boy in the local movie theater. But for Zosha’s parents, life is about how they survived when everyone around them died during the Holocaust. Now their daughter--born in a German DP camp and raised in New York City--must find her own way to survive.

With unique emotional honesty, Sonia Pilcer illuminates Zosha’s journey through the terra incognita of life as a “2G”-- a Second Generation Holocaust survivor. Compelled to deal with her family’s past while grappling with the way forward, Zosha finds herself writing poetry about the Holocaust, falling in love with a former neo-Nazi, dreaming of Auschwitz, and being seduced by a kinky Holocaust scholar. Fiercely moving and somehow funny too, The Holocaust Kid captures what it means to be born in the shadows of death, and to live and love without forgetting.

“Articulate and unerring...[a] daunting work.”
Alan L. Berger, Hadassah Magazine

“The Holocaust Kid will be familiar to readers of Pilcer’s earlier novels, but this is clearly her strongest, deepest work, one that will bring up conflicting emotions and resonate long after the book has been put down.”
--The Women’s Review of Books

“Told with verve, wit, and the kind of passion that is often missing from contemporary fiction. in short, this is a book to be read and cherished.”
--Oscar Hijuelos, author of The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love