I Didn't Kill Jesus

Naomi Haber was born during the 1960s in Germany to a Jewish father, a survivor of eight concentration camps, and a German Christian mother who converted to Judaism when they married.Their marriage would defy convention and popular opinion. Their children would grow up in a nation that had only barely begun to deal with the genocide they had perpetrated some two decades earlier. Naomi grew up in the small town of Straubing, Germany and she was raised as a German Jewish girl in a country anxious, uncertain, and all too eager to forget its fresh and treacherous history. In grade school, Haber was surrounded by classmates who weren't accepting of Jewish history or culture. Neither textbooks nor history classes would venture to discuss the Nazis and their annihilation of world Jewry. "Nazis, Nazi sympathizers, and Germans who hated the Jews lived all around us," writes Haber. Wanting acceptance, Haber would leave Germany at age sixteen to work on a kibbutz in Israel. Two years later, she would marry and settle in the United States. Eventually, she would remarry and make her way through this new country while still tending to the wounds of the old world. A cohesive story told from the viewpoint of a child of a survivor, I Didn't Kill Jesus is a narrative that will draw readers into its lived history. Haber's is a tale of survival through generations, of family love, and of the consequences it brings.