Quiet Americans

“Erika Dreifus’s remarkable Quiet Americans traces the shock waves of the Holocaust reverberating outward through generations of American Jews. These intelligent and multi-layered stories are packed with surprises that challenge us to reconsider what we know—or think we know—about good and evil, memory and forgiveness, survival and identity….A first-rate debut.”
–Margot Singer, author of The Pale of Settlement

“In searing, pitch-perfect prose, Erika Dreifus evokes in Quiet Americans the heart-wrenching intersections between domesticity and war. Drenched in the blood-soaked history of the Holocaust-—yet attentive to those quietest moments between husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, parents and children—these stories gather unexpected force sentence by sentence, page by page. On several occasions during my reading, I needed to remind myself to breathe.”
–Andrew Furman, author of Contemporary Jewish American Writers and the Multicultural Dilemma


A high-ranking Nazi’s wife and a Jewish doctor in prewar Berlin. A Jewish immigrant soldier and the German POWs he is assigned to supervise. A refugee returning to Europe for the first time just as terrorists massacre Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. A son of survivors and the family secrets modern technology may reveal. These are some of the characters and conflicts that emerge in Quiet Americans, in stories that reframe familiar questions about what is right and wrong, remembered and repressed, resolved and unending.


Erika Dreifus lives in New York City. Quiet Americans, published by Last Light Studio, is her first book of fiction and was inspired in large part by her paternal grandparents, German Jews who immigrated to the United States in the late 1930s. Portions of the proceeds from sales of Quiet Americans will be donated to The Blue Card, which supports survivors of Nazi persecution and their families in the United States.