‘An Epiphany in Lilacs’
Fair Lawn writer retells her father’s survival and immigration story
Sometimes stories have to be retold. Sometimes circumstances demand it.
Surviving the Holocaust took extraordinary strength, both of character and of body, as well as extraordinary luck. To have survived it was to live with the kind of trauma that the now-fashionable word can’t possibly begin to describe.
So how did Holocaust survivors remake their lives, knowing what they knew? Having seen what they saw?
It was different for each one of them, of course. Iris Dorbian of Fair Lawn knows a great deal about how one of those survivors made it through the rest of his life. That’s because her father, Hirsch Dorbian, was one of them.
She wrote a novel based on his life, called “An Epiphany in Lilacs,” that just was rereleased, and she talked about how and why that happened, as well as about the story itself.
The story, in brief: Hirsch was born in Latvia in 1930, sent to a work camp when he was 12, then to a concentration camp, and was liberated in 1945. The story, like all stories of the camps, was harrowing, and he didn’t like to tell it. He went from a DP camp, where he learned about tool and die fabrication, to Paterson, where he had a cousin. He was drafted into the U.S. Army for the Korean conflict but wasn’t sent overseas. When the war ended, he devoted himself to becoming an accentless American newly named Harry. He married and had two children, Elliot and Iris; his wife, Esther Dorbian, who was born in Palestine, opened a clothing store in Fair Lawn, appropriately called Esther’s, that flourished for 45 years, closing only when she retired. Both were larger than life, it seems.
Iris went to NYU; after graduation she became an actress and then a journalist, with a degree from Columbia’s journalism school; logically enough, she wrote books about the theater. Eventually, though, her father’s story, which always had taken up a great deal of space in her imagination, demanded that she turn it into a book, and she did.
It was a fictionalized version of his life, but not about the Holocaust. Instead, it was about his life after the war, as he tried to find out what happened to his family, and to make a new life for himself.
“So much is written about the Holocaust, but so little is written about the aftermath,” she said in 2017, when the book first came out. “About the DP camps. About coming to America. I think that this fills a necessary gap in knowledge.
“It is not about the horror,” she added. “It is about how you move on after most of your family has been destroyed, and you don’t know if anybody is alive. You are trying to move on.”
Immigration is an issue in this country again. It’s not about Jewish refugees from a war mainly in Europe this time; instead, it’s mainly (although not entirely) about people trying to escape poverty and violence in Central and South America. But those immigrants, like the Jews and other European (and Chinese) immigrants before them, are looking for safety, a respite from violence, and a way to start new lives.
At the same time, Jews are facing an upsurge in antisemitism.
So now it’s time to republish her book, Ms. Dorbian said. And the logistics involved present their own challenge.
Her first publisher was the Israeli-based Mazo; that was good, but the company doesn’t have a large distribution in North America. Next, she self-published it during covid. “It got some nice responses, and then I forgot about it,” Ms. Dorbian said. “I worked on other things.”
But then, “after the October 7 Hamas pogrom in Israel, antisemitism intensified into a deafening crescendo,” she said. “It reached a pitch I’d never heard before in my life. I was alarmed. Constantly alarmed.
“And it wasn’t just that. It also seemed that I was reading a lot of comments online from people who felt that the Holocaust never happened. And I saw the protests on college campuses, and particularly at Columbia. That was a stab in my heart, because I’d gone to Columbia. So I thought, ‘Okay. I would like more people to read ‘An Epiphany in Lilacs.’ I would like more people to know about the Holocaust. Maybe this could be my own antidote to what is going on.
“So I decided that I was going to do an Amazon free download.” That’s a promotion that self-published authors can use to boost sales by making their books free for a day. “And I decided to do it on January 27, 2024. That’s Holocaust Remembrance Day. I promoted it a little bit, and it did well. It was number one in two categories that day — coming of age and literary. I was shocked.
“My Amazon rating went up.”
The reviews also were good, but she paid attention to one in particular. “A reader praised the story — she said it was well written, held her attention, and was very compelling — but she felt it needed to be repackaged. And I knew that it was floundering in self-publishing purgatory.”
She found a publisher — Sunbury Press — who wanted to publish “Epiphany,” and she rewrote the preface.
“By that time — December 2024 — antisemitism in this country was through the roof, and I realized that it was much worse now than it was when I self-published. So I looked at some statistics, and I saw that in September 2020, according to the Claims Conference, a majority of young American adults did not know that six million Jews were killed during the Holocaust, and 11 percent believed that Jews caused the Holocaust.
“The same survey said that almost half of 18- to 24-year-olds could not name a single concentration camp, and almost a quarter said that the Holocaust was a myth.
“These are sad and shocking findings.”
Ms. Dorbian doesn’t think that her book is likely to change many minds, because “I do suspect that I’m preaching to the converted,” she said. “But it is out there as an educational resource.
“When I first wrote the book, I wanted to fill in the gap about the aftermath of the Holocaust, but now I’m thinking that it counters and debunks the idea that it didn’t happen.
“And it’s even more critical than ever to do that, because the survivors are dying, or they’re gone. My father is gone. My father’s sister,” who survived, although Hirsch didn’t know that for a long time, “just turned 99 a few weeks ago.” And her mother still is very much with us, she added.
“I remember that a few months before my dad died, on October 15, 2010, when he was really ill, ravaged with cancer and in pain, he was reading something about how more people were denying that the Holocaust happened,” she said.
“I will never forget him saying, ‘How can they say that it didn’t happen? I was there. I saw it. I lived it.’”
His daughter is doing what she does best — writing — to help remind the world that the Holocaust did happen, and that at least some of its survivors managed to remake their lives despite it.
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