Jennifer Krebs, formerly of Spencerport, has released a memoir titled Stumbling Blocks (Legacy Books Press LLC). In the book, Krebs traces the legacy of her Jewish family from pre-war Germany to post-war America through a lens both personal and historical. Named after the Stolpersteine – small brass plaques embedded in European sidewalks to memorialize Holocaust victims – this memoir explores how trauma ripples through generations. The book weaves together her father’s memories of life under Nazi rule, stories of relatives lost and found, and her own experience growing up in Spencerport, often the only Jewish child in her class.
Paul, Jennifer’s father, was born in Germany in 1928. At the age of ten, just after Kristallnacht, his parents sent him and his older sisters to Belgium. There, they lived for two years with relatives they barely knew. In 1941, Paul’s parents reunited with the children and fled Germany. When Jennifer was born in the 1950s, she was called a lucky girl. She was born at a time of relative peace and safety.
Growing up on her father’s dairy farm in Spencerport, she felt the presence of the people left behind, whose incomplete histories were told in fragments. Was this because no one knew what happened? Or was someone trying to protect her? Stumbling Blocks is Jennifer’s journey to find truth and meaning from the legacy of the Holocaust.
Krebs recounts the pain of intergenerational silence and survival, as well as the daily triumphs of adaptation and identity. She asks what it means to remember when no one wants to talk, to carry burdens that others have buried, and to live with inherited grief. Yet Stumbling Blocks is also infused with humor, curiosity, and deep love – for family, for ritual, for storytelling, and for truth.
Through visits to ancestral towns, historical research, and rich anecdotes, the memoir becomes a journey of reclamation. Readers are invited to witness the small, profound moments that build resilience: Passover dinners, driving the tractor on the family farm, and navigating adolescence in a town with no other Jewish families.
Jennifer Krebs offers a deeply human narrative about how memory shapes identity. Stumbling Blocks is at once a remembrance and a reckoning – a story for anyone navigating history, heritage, and the weight of the past.
Jennifer Krebs is now based in the San Francisco Bay Area and New York’s Catskill mountains. A second-generation Holocaust descendant, she draws on her family’s lived experience to explore the legacy of memory, trauma, and resilience. She has traveled to visit her family’s homes in Europe. She has been speaking about her Jewish identity and second-generation experience since her childhood.
She is semi-retired from a career working to study and protect the natural resources of the Bay Area. Stumbling Blocks is her debut memoir.
The author plans to give proceeds from the book to Widen the Circle (https://widenthecircle.org/). This organization confronts long-standing injustice rooted in racism, antisemitism, and attacks on democratic values by empowering local activists in Germany and the U.S. who expose legacies of persecution, bring communities together, and promote healing. They create networks of support, collaboration, and education for these activists through fellowships, workshops, increased recognition, and resources to make them more effective in their work.
Stumbling Blocks can be ordered from Lift Bridge Book Shop, 45 Main Street, Brockport,
liftbridgebooks.com.
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