Carl Friedman is one of Holland's most successful and distinctive women writers, an author of novels, poems, stories, and essays featuring strong female characters. She is internationally recognized as an important voice of the "second generation"--children of Holocaust survivors, those whose lives were influenced by the Holocaust even though they did not experience it directly.

Carolina "Carl" Friedman was born in Eindhoven, a city in the south of the Netherlands, on 29 April 1952, and was raised in Antwerp, Belgium. She is the daughter of Holocaust survivors Bette and Jochel Friedman, who also have two sons. From the age of fifteen she kept her own private archive of documents on the subject. She read many books dealing with the Holocaust and World War II, and its implications can be seen in most of her work. After graduating high school, Friedman began but did not complete a course in simultaneous...