Ep. 73- Getting Under the Skin: Journey from Estrangement to Forgiveness with Vivian Kalvaria

TRANSCRIPT

Conversation with Vivien

Gissele: [00:00:00]

Just wanna shout out to Feed Spot slash overcoming adversity for selecting our podcast as their top 10 podcasts.

Thank you. Thank you for acknowledging all our hard work. Hello and welcome to the Love and Compassion podcast with Gissele. We believe that love and compassion have the power to heal our lives and our world. Don’t forget to like and subscribe for more amazing content. Today we’re talking about getting under the skin, journey from estrangement to forgiveness, and I’ll be talking to Vivien Kalvaria, whose creative journey began in Rhodesia, where she discovered a love for theater as a child.

Although she began her career on stages her true passion laid behind the scenes, producing and directing. She opened a drama studio for children and staged plays at the local theater. At 24, she was appointed news director for Rhodesia Television, the first television station in southern Africa.

After moving to South Africa and then to the United States, [00:01:00] Vivien turned her focus to writing. She’s the author of Break and Hold, and has just completed a deeply personal memoir. My Name is Not Rifka, about her mother-in-law, a Schindler survivor. The book explores tumultuous relationship, the scars of intergenerational trauma and what it truly takes to move from anger to forgiveness.

A lifelong student of Holocaust history and its psychological legacy, Vivien brings rare insight into the wounds of the past, echo through generations and what it means to heal them. Please join us in welcoming Vivien. Hi.

Vivien: Hi. Thanks for having me, Gissele. It’s good to be with you.

Gissele: Oh yes. It’s so great to be with you.

 I think this conversation is very, very timely.

 I was wondering if you could begin by telling the audience how you got to write this memoir for your mother-in-law.

Vivien: Well, in order to understand [00:02:00] the sort of genesis of all of this and to understand the forgiveness piece of this story, we have to go back to where it all began.

when I started dating Zach, that’s my husband, his mother, Rifka everything she could to sabotage our relationship for two years, she would randomly call me at all hours of the night hysterically crying, insulting, yelling, begging me to walk away from the relationship.

She refused to attend our wedding and turned much of the community against me. Only a handful of people actually showed up. I was devastated and furious, and for a couple of years we were estranged. What I didn’t understand then, but would come to learn much later, was that her behavior was rooted in her past.

Rifka carried wounds from traumas I knew nothing about. In fact, nobody knew about them, and that was the stumbling block. She [00:03:00] never spoke about her past for 50 years. It was this dark secret that everyone tiptoed around, her sons grew up, and knew nothing about what she’d gone through as a child. All we had was this tattoo on her arm, a daily reminder that she’d been in a concentration camp.

For me, her silence made it nearly impossible to understand her, let alone try and repair our relationship. So I stayed angry and resentful, not just because she had rejected me as a daughter-in-law, but because I had no frame of reference to understand what motivated her hostility. I couldn’t make sense of why she had waged such a fierce campaign to stop me from marrying her son.

There was nothing in my background or my family’s background to suggest that we had done something terrible. So for two years we were estranged.

Gissele: Did she ever tell you why, [00:04:00] specifically?

Vivien: She was just looking for an excuse. There wa