Raised with miracle of parents’ survival, author writes magical Holocaust tales

With the X-Men and vampires as her influences, Helen Maryles Shankman brings ‘fabulist’ realism to Wlodawa, Poland

By Matt Lebovic or The Times of Israel
   
It took a story about a partisan with a knife jumping out of a tree to convince a young Helen Maryles Shankman that “Jews fought back” during the Holocaust.

As she grew up in Chicago during the 1960s and 70s, Shankman’s survivor parents — the late Brenda and Barry Maryles — often told her “vivid stories” about wartime Poland.

Almost all of her parents’ friends had lived through the Shoah, and the author recalls thinking of them, “they didn’t know how to be American. My parents were not like the people in ‘Dick & Jane,’” she told The Times of Israel in an interview.

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