(Courtesy of Judaica House) Judaica House, the premier retailer of Judaica in Northern New Jersey, has selected “Loss & Legacy” by local author Sam A. Gronner among its newly featured Holocaust-related book selections.

Gronner, a former journalist for The Record and other regional media, has written a post-Holocaust biography centered on his German-born father’s half-century quest to reclaim the inheritance stolen from him during the Nazi era. The book relates the author’s travelogue into his father’s past in Ilmenau, a small town in the German state of Thuringia, where the family owned a landmark building housing two floors of showrooms of their garment shop, as well a dwelling above the store. The author’s father, at the time named Joachim Gronner, made aliyah in 1937 at age 16 to complete his schooling. Joachim’s parents, Helene and Samuel Gronner, remained in Germany, and were deported and killed in 1942.

“Loss & Legacy” (Full Court Press, ISBN 978-1-946989-49-9) tells the Israel-born author’s story of emigration and subsequent 1959 arrival in the Bronx. The narrative runs in parallel with his father’s pursuit of compensation for the forced 1938 sale of the business to a Nazi Party member. The quest for justice eventually succeeded after the 1990 reunification of Germany, when the authorities restored property rights to John Gronner, the name adopted by the author’s father upon naturalization. Despite the Nazi regime’s efforts to obliterate the Gronner family, its reputation has been restored in the town’s official memorial to local Shoah victims.