First Generation Singular

A member of the first generation growing up after World War II when Nazi Germany killed more than six million Jews in horrific acts of genocide, Shirlee Sky Hoffman became aware of the Holocaust at an early age. In her hauntingly intimate poetry and prose, she probes the reverberations of living, at first reluctantly, for two years in the 1970s, in a country where a few decades before she would have been exterminated.

Hoffman's writing includes descriptions of her positive experiences in West Germany, largely shaped by a close group of German friends. She intersperses explorations of how remembering the destruction wrought by the Holocaust has permeated her life and that of the broader Jewish community with reflections on the ironies of her family's history and on the persistence of evil.

By publishing First Generation Singular: Reactions to Living in Post-Holocaust Germany, a stunning tribute to her Jewish heritage and legacy, Hoffman participates in memorializing the Holocaust and its clear lessons for humanity.

Comments from pre-publication readers:

"You write poetry I can understand....beautiful, powerful, sometimes raw."

"...intense, searching; awakened deep emotions and questions."

"The prose and poems in this book confront some of the most difficult topics ever...the impossibilities of comprehending the Holocaust's destruction."