166. What’s Ours to Tell featuring Julie Brill

Julie Brill joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about growing up the daughter of a Holocaust survivor and her journey to understand the unexamined childhood stories she grew up with, being a reluctant memoirist and leaning into telling the story of an ordinary person figuring things out, the Holocaust and the history of the Jews of Serbia, inherited memories, making ourselves the central character, when our parents’ foundational stories become ours, finding our place, permission to tell a story if you didn’t live through it, and her new memoir HIdden in Plain Sight: A Family Memoir and the Untold Story of the Holocaust in Serbia.

Also in this episode:

-the missing missing

-the unthought known

-making research readable

Books mentioned in this episode:

Three Minutes in Poland by Glenn Kertz

Paper Love by Sarah Wildman

Plunder by Menachem Kaiser

Big Magic by Liz Gilbert

The Creative Process by Twyla Tharp

As a child, Julie Brill held two conflicting beliefs. She knew Germans had murdered her Jewish grandfather in occupied Yugoslavia, yet she somehow believed the Holocaust had never come to his hometown of Belgrade. The family anecdotes her father passed down, a blend of his early memories and what his mother told him, didn’t match what Julie had heard about Germany, Poland, and Anne Frank in Holland during World War II.

Even frequent readers of Holocaust history likely do not understand the Serbian story. Destruction there came early and fast. Without cattle cars, gas chambers, or distant camps, the Nazis murdered almost the entire Jewish population before the plan for the Final Solution was even set.

With so few Jewish survivors and descendants from Serbia, the story of the Shoah there has gone untold. Julie’s quest to understand and share what she learned led to Hidden in Plain Sight: A Family Memoir and the Untold Story of the Holocaust in Serbia.

Julie has written for Haaretz, the Forward, Kveller, The Times of Israel, Balkan Insight, and elsewhere. She shares her family’s experiences in the Holocaust in middle and high school classrooms through Living Links.

Additionally, Julie is a lactation consultant, doula, childbirth educator, and the author of the anthology Round the Circle: Doulas Share Their Experiences. She began attending births and teaching childbirth classes in 1992 and has supported thousands of families in the childbearing year. She graduated from Tufts University with a degree in Sociology and Gender Studies and completed the Massachusetts Midwifery Alliance Apprenticeship Course. She is the mother of two adult daughters.

Connect with Julie:

Website: https://juliebrill.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/juliesbrill/

Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/juliebrill.bsky.social

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/julie.brill1

X: https://www.Twitter.com/juliebrill8

Get her book: https://mybook.to/irl0

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Ronit’s writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Rumpus, The New York Times, Poets & Writers, The Iowa Review, Hippocampus, The Washington Post, Writer’s Digest, American Literary Review, and elsewhere. Her memoir WHEN SHE COMES BACK about the loss of her mother to the guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and their eventual reconciliation was named Finalist in the 2021 Housatonic Awards Awards, the 2021 Indie Excellence Awards, and was a 2021 Book Riot Best True Crime Book. Her short story collection HOME IS A MADE-UP PLACE won Hidden River Arts’ 2020 Eludia Award and the 2023 Page Turner Awards for Short Stories.

She earned an MFA in Nonfiction Writing at Pacific University, is Creative Nonfiction Editor at The Citron Review, and teaches memoir through the University of Washington's Online Continuum Program and also independently. She launched Let's Talk Memoir in 2022, lives in Seattle with her family of people and dogs, and is at work on her next book.

More about Ronit: https://ronitplank.com

Subscribe to Ronit’s Substack: https://substack.com/@ronitplank

Follow Ronit:

https://www.instagram.com/ronitplank/

https://www.facebook.com/RonitPlank

https://bsky.app/profile/ronitplank.bsky.social

Background photo credit: Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash

Headshot photo credit: Sarah Anne Photography

Theme music: Isaac Joel, Dead Moll’s Fingers