title: Googling for ghosts: a meditation on writers' block, mourning, and the Holocaust.
abstract: The author describes her father's experience of being a Holocaust survivor and how his unfinished mourning contributed to her struggle with muteness, her own story being dwarfed by the magnitude of her father's losses. When her non-Jewish mother is chosen to be honored by Yad Vashem, the ceremony proves unexpectedly powerful. The witnessing by community, through the Internet, helps dissolve the shame and isolation, heals some of the trauma, and promotes greater psychological freedom. In creating this paper, the author memorializes her parents and her lost relatives, and succeeds in working through much that had haunted her.
authors.affiliation: Mount Sinai Medical Center. sylvief@aol.com
authors.forename: Sylvia
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Flescher
mesh_terms: D002562:Ceremonial Behavior; D005260:Female; D006117:Grief; D049673:History, 20th Century; D017767:Holocaust / Q000523:psychology*; D006801:Humans; D020407:Internet; D007585:Jews; D007599:Judaism; D008297:Male; D019122:Meditation; D010287:Parent-Child Relations; D010290:Parents / Q000523:psychology; D012069:Religion and Psychology; D057386:Search Engine; D017741:Survivors / Q000523:psychology; D014956:Writing