A member of the first generation growing up after World War II when Nazi Germany killed more than six million Jews in horrific acts of genocide, Shirlee Sky Hoffman became aware of the Holocaust at an early age. In her hauntingly intimate poetry and prose, she probes the reverberations of living, at first reluctantly, for two years in the 1970s, in a country where a few decades before she would have been exterminated.

Hoffman's writing includes descriptions of her positive experiences in West Germany, largely shaped by a close group of German friends. She intersperses explorations...