Julie Gruenbaum Fax

Beating the Odds Julie Gruenbaum Fax

Beating the OddsFleeing Nazi Germany was just the start. Dr. Otto Kahn never thought of himself as a Holocaust survivor. He has only vague memories of fleeing with his family from their small German village of Lorsch, after Nazis torched the synagogue and twice imprisoned his father. In this candid and compelling memoir, Otto examines how that remembered legacy shaped his life. His parents demanded hard work and industriousness of Otto and his four older brothers on their Canadian cattle farm, and Otto relied on that work ethic, competitiveness, and doggedness to succeed - contrary to his family's expectations - in college and medical school and then in his unconventional career as a California cardiologist who never maintain an office. Culminating in a trip back to Lorsch in 2015 with his late-in-life family, Otto's journey is a testament to the unflagging resolve set in motion by his mother's words in a Canadian farmhouse on a rainy autumn day in 1939: "We are free."