Tuesday, March 2, 2004 | 8:14 a.m.
For Fern Schumer Chapman, questions about her heritage began at age 5 when her mother opened an atlas and said, "This is the town where I am from."
Curiosity followed. But Chapman learned little more.
"It was really clear from the time I was young that the past was something to avoid," Chapman said via telephone from her home in Lake Bluff, Ill. "It was a hole."
It would turn out that the town her mother was from was more than a speck on a map. Stockstadt, Germany, was where her family was broken, ridiculed and driven out by the rising Nazi movement.
Chapman's mother had escaped the Holocaust in 1938 when her parents sent her alone on an ocean liner to the United States at age 12. She never saw them again. Nor did she discuss them.
It wasn't until Chapman was an adult and had children of her own that her mother, Edith Westerfeld, said she wanted to see Stockstadt again.
The 1990 journey, chronicled in "Motherland, A Mother-Daughter Journey to Reclaim the Past," mended the strained mother-daughter relationship and eased her mother's pain.
"The sweetest thing is that it helped my mother put her past in the past," Chapman, 49, said.
Chapman will be in Las Vegas this week to discuss the story behind the book. The first discussion and book signing will be Wednesday at Temple Beth Sholom, 10700 Havenwood Lane. The other will be Thursday at West Charleston Library, 6301 W. Charleston Blvd.
The discussions are part of a career the former Chicago Tribune reporter began after the book was published. She speaks at schools, churches and synagogues.
"Motherland," Chapman says, is not so much a story of the Holocaust as it is a book about choices, morals, relationships and social issues.
"It's much broader than what people think it's about," Chapman said.
Dark cloud
The story not only looks at the effect World War II had on the Jews, but also how it haunted the Germans from her mother's own town, who were left to grapple with choices they made during the war.
"I think there's a dark shadow on any country that commits genocide," Chapman said. "As we get deeper and deeper into the story, we find there were all kinds of people affected.
"I don't know how you pick up the pieces. Everybody was deeply scarred."
In Chapman's account, Hans, the Stockstadt town historian, befriends the two and celebrates Westerfeld's return, only to later break down in a confession to Westerfeld where he says he did nothing to help the Jews (particularly Westerfeld's mother) when the Nazis were in power.
"What Hans did at 19 he is traumatized by at 80," Chapman said. "Genocide is a political act, but the experience is transmitted in personal ways."
Published in 2000, "Motherland" was a finalist in the 2000 National Jewish Book Awards. It appeared on "Oprah" and the film rights were sold to producer David Picker.
Though it was written for personal reasons, Chapman said she "didn't realize how much it would resonate with a larger audience."
"Motherhood" details the mother-daughter bickering, Chapman's struggle to understand her mother and their emotional late-night conversations.
"Suddenly we were forced to talk about what had defined her," Chapman said. "Once she removed that lid, she could share herself. Ultimately, she felt liberated by it."
Her mother's memories begin to pour as soon as the two leave the airport and drive to Stockstadt. After five decades, the town is nearly unrecognizable. If it weren't for the ladybugs that her mother remembers being so prevalent in Stockstadt, she would not have been sure she had arrived in the right place.
After realizing that they are indeed in Stockstadt, Westerfeld grabs a phone book and looks for her father's name, even though she learned at age 15 that her parents had died.
"I always thought, if anyone survived, he would," Westerfeld says.
The two visit a family friend and former housekeeper, whose pleasant memories eventually lose out to stories of how Westerfeld's family began to lose the business, the right to study music and swim in the community swimming pool.
At an impromptu reunion held in Westerfeld's honor, former classmates who taunted her for being Jewish now embrace her.
Facing the truth
The stories, names and faces were new to Chapman. Her mother had coped in silence. She had even separated herself from the religion -- while Chapman knew she was Jewish, she wasn't raised with any religious education.
However, as Chapman explains in the book, her mother's past was always prevalent.
"For her the past isn't prologue; it is the whole story," Chapman writes. "The past is always present, as those she loved in Germany have dwelled in her inner life. Death ended the lives of her mother and father, but it didn't end the relationships."
Sandy Mallin, past president of Temple Beth Sholom, who along with Randee Kelley arranged Chapman's visit, said she wanted young people to have a chance to hear Chapman speak.
"It was such a moving story," Mallin said. "There are people in similar situations. In many of these homes, many of the parents are silent. I loved the relationship between a mother and a daughter."
Anti-Semitism has been in the news recently, as Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" has prompted debate on the subject. But Chapman is reluctant to comment on the controversy.
However, she said, "So many incidents have been cause for alarm regarding anti-Semitism in recent years. It's not hard to see how this happened.
"We're in trouble if one (group) is being persecuted or victimized."
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