My mother, a clinical social worker in the Baltimore city public school system, swears by the book The Choice by Edith Eva Eger. Eger survived the Holocaust and all of Mengele’s evil tests. It’s her spirit of embracing the possible, which makes Eger’s post-Holocaust psychology stand out. “We can choose what the horror teaches us,” Eger reminds us. “To become bitter in our grief and fear. Hostile. Paralyzed. Or to hold on to the childlike part of us, the lively and the curious part, the part that is innocent.”
No matter our struggles, ...