Seeking Shelter
Memoir of a Jewish Girlhood in Wartime Britain. By Cynthia Ehrenkrantz.
About Cynthia
In 1942, Anne Frank was thirteen and I was nine. While she was hiding from Nazis in Amsterdam, I’d been sent to an English village to escape the London Blitz. Although our stories are different, we were both children coping with World War 2. My memories of the London Blitz, food rationing and frequent separations from my parents are still vivid even though these events took place more than eighty years ago. Told from a child’s perspective, Seeking Shelter provides a first hand description of a British, Jewish child’s daily life during that terrible war.
Cynthia Ehrenkrantz
Author of Seeking Shelter
Praise for Seeking Shelter
“I loved reading Seeking Shelter. Ehrenkrantz’s account of her childhood in Britain during WW II was so filled with details, that I felt I was there with her. She offered an open and vulnerable account of her early years. I am not accustomed to this level of honesty and candor in a memoir. She didn’t seem to be trying to get her readers to see her in any particular way, just to invite us in, to see and experience life as she did.”
Joseph Berger
Author of Elie Wiesel: Confronting the Silence
“Cvnthia Ehrenkrantz transports us to World War II England… Readers will cheer her on as she grapples with wartime deprivations and dislocations and thank her for sensitizing us to the hardships the British endured and the comforts we take for granted.”
Esther Amini
Author of Concealed
“This beautifully written memoir is rich in particulars from the author’s girlhood in wartime Britain, giving us not just the sound of rockets and air raid sirens, the sight of bombed-out buildings, but also the smells and tastes of ration-era recipes, instructions for constructing and sleeping in home-built shelters, and an unexpected use for a gas mask. The narrative is sharp-eyed and fiercely honest, funny and heartbreaking, full of complex individuals responding to the hardships and dangers and occasional pleasures of civilian life in time of war, a life further complicated for the author and her family by intergenerational conflicts, class prejudice, and antisemitism. Seeking Shelter is an education and a delight.”
Lon Otto
Author of The Flower Trade and A Man in Trouble: Stories
