The Pessimist's Son: A Holocaust Memoir of Hope - Hardcover

by Alexander Kimel (Author), Martin Kimel (Author)

A personal Holocaust memoir, historically rich and deeply contextual, that traces intertwined family stories through Nazi and Soviet terror-and postwar challenges of survival and rebuilding.

The Pessimist's Son centers on Alexander Kimel, whose life unfolds from a shtetl in the Polish Ukraine, to a Nazi ghetto, to liberation. Interwoven is the harrowing story of his wife, Eva, whose father was murdered in the "Holocaust by Bullets," the mass shootings that claimed more than a million Jewish lives outside the camps.

Written as a dialogue across generations, the memoir offers a rare and intimate portrayal of Jewish survivors who remained in Communist Poland after the war. Narrative reflections by their son, informed by his lifelong relationship with Poland, provide historical and personal context throughout. The Pessimist's Son explores the antisemitism Alex and Eva faced, the lives they rebuilt under repression, and their decisions to leave Poland in 1956 and, ultimately, emigrate to America.

By including the experiences of extended family members, the book provides a panoramic portrait of Polish Jewry before, during, and after the Holocaust--revealing not only devastation and loss, but also ingenuity, determination, and resilience.

Author Biography

Alexander Kimel was born in Podhajce, Poland (now Pidhaitsi, Ukraine) in 1926. After the war, he earned a bachelor's and master's degree in electrical engineering at the Wroclaw Polytechnic University in Poland. In the U.S., he started and ran his own consulting engineering firm. Poems from his award-winning website on the Holocaust have been used in schools, universities and exhibits, widely reprinted, and recited on YouTube. He also contributed a chapter to the anthology, Life in the Ghettos during the Holocaust. He died in 2018.

Martin Kimel, the son of Alexander and Eva Kimel, is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and Stanford Law School. He is a securities lawyer in Washington, D.C. and lives in Maryland. He has written on the Holocaust and other topics for the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Baltimore Sun, Wall Street Journal, Times of Israel, Forward, Chicago Tribune and many other publications.