Grace Feuerverger
Winter Light
February 5, 2026
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Grace, a child of Holocaust survivors, was always searching for shelter but knew that her home was the last place where she could find it. She was eager to be out there in the world, but at every turn had to battle the demons which permeated her home – hissing their frightening, grim messages.

It wasn’t the language and culture of her people that saved her; it was the language and culture of strangers. At the core of this story stands a little girl struggling to find a path toward the Life force and to escape from the demons of despair that permeated her home. Winter Light is about a sequence of serendipitous rescues—an emotional rags-to-riches story.

Montréal offered Grace the chance of a lifetime. She was four years old when she discovered the joie-de-vivre of her French-Canadian neighbors in the working-class east end of her beloved city. As she grew older other serendipitous ‘rescues’ arrived in surprising ways in many different places, including Berkeley CA.

Vivid and lyrical, Winter Light is a deeply moving memoir dedicated to all who are coming from places of trauma. It is about the vast unknown territory ­of the human heart in spite of the ghosts that still haunt us.

Bio
Grace Feuerverger was born and raised in her beloved city of Montréal surrounded by a multitude of languages and cultures inside and outside her home. She is professor emerita of education and ethnography at the University of Toronto, and taught courses on language, culture and identity as well as peace education for many years.

Grace was educated at McGill University, the Università per Stranieri in Perugia, Italy, the University of California at Berkeley, the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and the University of Toronto. She has also been an invited member of the Canadian Commission for UNESCO for many years.

Among her many publications are two award-winning books: Oasis of Dreams (about a cooperative Jewish-Palestinian village in Israel) and Teaching, Learning and Other Miracles (about education as a sacred life journey) and her new book Winter Light: The Memoir of a Child of Holocaust Survivors.

Although now retired, her heart will always be in the classroom with her students. Grace and her husband divide their time between Toronto and Berkeley.