“Jeffrey Katz has found a way to add something revelatory and powerful to the vast literature of the Holocaust: With a reporter’s eye for detail and a passionate drive for stories that tell larger truths, he has produced a heartrending history of his Jewish family’s journey in and out of acceptance in pre-war Germany. He has returned to the homeland that rejected—and murdered—so many of his kinsmen, not so much to revisit the scars of genocide, but to understand those who have dedicated themselves to breaking their fellow Germans’ silence about the Shoah. In the endless battle between the quest to remember and the human need to forget, Katz pushes to find what really drives people to dig among the shadows of a past that still hides so much pain.”—MARC FISHER, author of After the Wall: Germany, the Germans and the Burdens of History

“Jeffrey Katz has given us an engaging and sensitive account of two worlds moving hesitantly toward each other via the past of his Jewish ancestors from two villages and two cities in Germany. As he belatedly uncovers their history, descendants of their persecutors try to face up to it, too. This is a remarkably balanced and human portrait of the benefits and limits of reconciliation over time and space.”—PETER HAYES, author of the bestselling Why? Explaining the Holocaust

“Who are the German ‘memory activists’ who resurrect the stories of Jews the Nazis murdered, and do so not out of collective guilt, but a kind of righteous shame? Jeffrey Katz finds in the unsettled ground of the book’s title a common ground with these truth-tellers, who just might reclaim the phrase ‘ordinary Germans.’ At the same time, Katz deftly takes up larger, knottier questions of public history and collective remembrance in this courageous, nuanced, and generous book. And he shares enough of himself to deliver that richest of hybrids—a reported memoir with the sweep of historical saga.”—ALEXANDER WOLFF, author of Endpapers: A Family Story of Books, War, Escape, and Home

Extensive outreach for placement and events in the D.C. area, with confirmed events at Politics & Prose and Wonderland Books.

Social Media and website with biweekly updates and additions of supporting materials, author interviews, and more.

Registration with the Jewish Book Council for their wide-reaching speaking circuit and review opportunities. Good reads give away of 15 copies in the month of Janruary.