The Things Left Unsaid (Carmel, 2025)

About the author

Shuli Feuer Schein (1953) – a journalist (Maariv, Kol Israel, Channel 1), art historian, chair of the Haifa Journalists’ Association, and lecturer on art and culture in venues across Israel. This is her first book; she is now working on the second.

Shuli Feuer Schein (Carmel, 2025)

A winter day, fragrant with the scents of blossom. Four women in a hurry to finish their day’s affairs, before taking part in a workshop for second generation Holocaust survivors. The women. During these encounters they will uncover the stories of three generations of powerful women, and partner in an unsettling journey to unravel the tangle of secrets, memories and childhood experiences that were forged during the years of the Second World War, and affect them to this day.

“I grew in the shadow of secrets”, says the author. “My parents never shared the story of their survival. My mother said that I ‘don’t need this burden’, while raising me for independence and survival as if World War III was pending. The stories began cropping up in bits and pieces over the final year of her life, while she was laying on her deathbed. I used to run to the car and write what she said before I forget; but unfortunately, her days were few, and after her passing I was left with a pile of notes in the car – notes that together ford an unusual and fascinating story about a newly-wed couple, who spent their formative years under false identities as part of the Polish underground. This is the core and genesis of the story, and around it I wrote a contemporary fictional narrative that should be familiar to hundreds of thousands of ‘second gens’. “Each of the women in the story has her own path: career, love, motherhood, hobbies, successes and failures; but they all have one thing in common: the feeling and knowledge that behind their story there lies yet another story, hidden and untold, that belies their and their families’ existence, and which they seek to unfurl.”