How Natural Wine Made Me Confront My German Problem

By

Alice Feiring

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Volume 07, The Literary Edition •
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Original papercut illustration by Anna Brones

For a Jewish baby boomer like me, the Holocaust was always part of my DNA. Yet, I was not the child of survivors. My Polish grandparents were safely in the United States by the 1920s. The family they left behind were mostly killed. In yeshiva, where I spent a dozen years splitting my curriculum between religious and secular studies, we were frequently subjected to footage of emaciated bodies, piled up for burning or disposal. Teachers didn’t hide the numbers tattooed on their arms. But the personal horror stories my cousins told of Polish concentration camps and ghettos were the images…

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Alice Feiring is a journalist, author, and natural wine expert. Her book titles include Natural Wine for the People, The Dirty Guide to Natural Wine, For the Love of Wine, Naked Wine, and The Battle for Wine and Love. Her newsletter, The Feiring Line, focuses on natural, organic, and biodynamic wines from the ground up.

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