Greetings!
I’m Jennifer Krebs. My memoir Stumbling Blocks was published July 2025.
This substack contains out-takes from the book, as well as related or follow-up materials. If you subscribe, you’ll get occasional emails from me.
A little about Stumbling Blocks, the book
In Stumbling Blocks, author Jennifer Krebs traces the legacy of her Jewish family from prewar Germany to postwar 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 small-town Spencerport, New York, often the only Jewish child in her class.
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.
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A little about me
Jennifer Krebs is a writer based in the San Francisco Bay Area and New York’s Catskills 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.
Thanks for finding me!
Stumbling Blocks, the memorial art project
Stumbling Blocks, or Stolpersteine, is the name of a public art project started by Gunter Demnig in Germany. The idea behind the project is to show where displaced people used to live around Europe and what happened to them. The little gold “stones” are placed in sidewalks in front of homes. Below are the stolpersteine for my dad and his family. You will note that they flucht/fled Germany in 1941 for the US.
Stumbling Blocks is the name of my memoir. It’s the story of a girl and her dad, and how both of us grappled with the legacy of the Holocaust. My dad is currently 94 & I’m 65. You’d think the grappling part would be past. Then again….
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In weekly posts, I’ll share photos and anecdotes from the memoir. Some of these will explore intergenerational pain, others the joy in life.
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