January 2005: Live, Laugh and Learn: Tales of Tumultuous Times (McIntosh)

Post date: Jan 07, 2010 6:17:4 PM

At our January 20, 2005 meeting at Catherine Veramo's house in Oakland, we discussed a book written by one of our members, Ros McIntosh, titled Live, Laugh and Learn: Tales of Tumultuous Times, published by Infinity Publishing. The book is a series of real-life vignettes from wartime experiences in Germany to family life in California. Ros attended Smith on a Fulbright scholarship, and has lived in the US ever since, though she often visited friends and relatives in Europe. Started as a way to share parts of her life with her daughters, Ros expanded her writing to include her experience as a studious, hard-working mother in California. We were glad to hear she is considering expanding on the first part, which describes some of her experiences as a child in eastern Germany before and during WWII. We were intrigued and eager to fill in more detail and the connections between the stories, as this particular perspective, as not-Jew and not-Nazi, is rare in the literature we know of about life in that time in Germany. (Ros' father refused to join the Nazi party, and he and the family relied on their many connections and the diplomacy of their Scandinavian mother.)