Helen Epstein > Quotes

“Before you say anything censorious about anyone, ask yourself three questions: Is it true? Is it kind? Is it necessary? If the answer to any one of these is even a qualified no, you’d best be quiet.” And she remembered it. Miss”
― Helen Epstein, Miss DeLay: portrait of beloved violin teacher Dorothy DeLay

“The expulsion of the Sudeten Germans following the annihilation of the Czechoslovak Jews — both highly educated, skilled, and largely middle-class segments of the population — left Czechoslovakia with an economic vacuum that the government hurried to fill.”
― Helen Epstein, Where She Came From: A Daughter's Search for Her Mother's History

“It is by now a truism that the victim is often blamed for the crime. Perpetrators tend to deny, repress, forget. Victims attempt to master trauma by assuming responsibility for it.”
― Helen Epstein, Where She Came From: A Daughter's Search for Her Mother's History

“She experienced the occupation of her country as a Czech. It would be months before she would be forced to experience it as a Jew.”
― Helen Epstein, Where She Came From: A Daughter's Search for Her Mother's History

“A few decades earlier, Florence Nightingale had written that orphanhood was a woman’s prerequisite to an interesting life, that a woman’s mother, father, siblings — often, her entire family — needed to be dead so that she might be spared the obligations of a dutiful relation.”
― Helen Epstein, Where She Came From: A Daughter's Search for Her Mother's History