A Son’s Tribute

Martin Kimel, JD ’86, pieces together his parents’ stories of war, survival, and the difficult years that followed

October 28, 2025

By Monica Schreiber, writer for The Stanford Lawyer

As Jewish children in Poland, Alexander and Eva knew ordinary lives—until armies closed in from east and west.

Alexander lived in a small shtetl in what is now Ukraine and Eva in a larger city south of Warsaw. The Red Army came first, seizing Alexander’s family’s home and store, while Jewish neighbors were arrested and deported to Siberia. After the German army invaded Soviet territory, the family ended up in the Rohatyn ghetto, where starvation and terror became daily companions. Eva’s family fled east at the start of the war. In her ghetto, the Nazis shot her father over a mass grave. She and her mother and sister escaped into the forest where they lived like shadows for nearly two years, scavenging for food and enduring bitter winters.

After the war, when only a tiny fraction of Poland’s Jews remained—fewer than 50,000 out of a prewar population of 3.3 million—Alexander and Eva would eventually meet, marry, and begin again. Their son, Martin Kimel, JD ’86, has now pieced together their often-heartbreaking stories in The Pessimist’s Son: A Holocaust Memoir of Hope (Cherry Orchard Books, 2025), a book he describes as a “dialogue across generations.” 

Drawing on his late father’s own writings, both parents’ Shoah Foundation testimonies, as well as his own research, Kimel preserves a story not only of Holocaust survival but also of the seldom-told struggles of the few Jews who remained in postwar communist Poland. The camps were gone, but antisemitism and hardship endured.

The story is both deeply personal and sweeping in its historical arc, says Kimel, who recently retired as a senior special counsel with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

“I grew up surrounded by Holocaust survivors,” he recalls. “Despite having gone through hell, these were not broken people. They built families, careers, and new lives. My father, as a teenager, helped bury his murdered classmates in a mass grave. He watched his mother die of typhus. And yet he went on to run his own engineering firm in the United States. My mother, after surviving the war, faced such severe antisemitism as a student in post-war Poland that for a time she denied being Jewish and wanted to change her last name. But she earned a university degree before finally emigrating and raising a family where Judaism was core to our identity. That is the resilience that I wanted to capture.”

Alexander and Eva Kimel lived in Poland until 1956, when they received permission to leave, first to Israel, later making their way to the United States, where they settled in Teaneck, New Jersey.

Legal Tools and Explaining History

Kimel says he wrote The Pessimist’s Son, his first book, for a broad audience while also offering material that scholars and researchers could use. He notes that many university libraries, including Stanford’s, have added it to their collections. 

His legal training was essential, he says, to pulling together the sprawling story of his parents, which required extensive archival research, including poring over accounts preserved in yizkor books, community memorial volumes compiled by Holocaust survivors to document the destroyed towns and the lives once lived there. The analytical skills he developed also helped him put his family’s stories into historical context by drawing on the work of scholars.

And the writing discipline he developed at Stanford Law, especially from Professor Robert Weisberg, also proved helpful in writing the book, he adds. “Professor Weisberg was my small section professor and he said something about the process of writing that has always stayed with me: good legal writing is simply good writing,” Kimel recalls. “There is nothing distinctive about the ability to be a good legal writer, except, perhaps, for the ability to draft footnotes. Good writing is simply good writing.”

Martin Kimel, JD ’86, author of “The Pessimist’s Son: A Holocaust Memoir of Hope”

Kimel’s father, Alexander, had his own flair for language. His unpublished memoir, A Child of the Shoah, forms the basis for the first part of The Pessimist’s Son. English was one of the eight languages the elder Kimel spoke, and in it he wrote with spare, unflinching clarity. Of the rhythms of his early life in Podhajce, the shtetl where he spent his pre-war years, he described a place where Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews lived together in “hateful harmony,” neighbors bound by need and divided by resentment.

Life in the shtetl came with nicknames, he wrote, often bestowed to highlight a person’s worst traits. Alexander Kimel’s father, Leon, got off lightly: he was known simply as the Pessimist. In an era when pessimism was arguably universal, the name might have seemed unremarkable. But as Martin Kimel writes in The Pessimist’s Son, his grandfather’s negative outlook may have helped the family survive as long as they did. By always assuming the worst, the Pessimist prepared escape routes and hiding places, including underground bunkers in their ghetto, that gave the family a chance to survive. 

“My parents, grandparents, and other relatives endured horrors most people can hardly imagine, yet those who survived rebuilt—again and again,” Kimel says. “Without their resilience, I wouldn’t be here to tell their story, and to honor the lives they made in the face of so much loss.”