Never Forget
by Lynn Andriani -- Publishers Weekly, 6/5/2006
This fall brings a new trend in Holocaust-related books: works by children of survivors about their parents' and relatives' experiences. Two make nods to Art Spiegelman's seminal graphic memoir, Maus; another has been compared to The Diary of Anne Frank; while another blends detective tale and family memoir.
| I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors by Bernice Eisenstein (Riverhead, Aug.) | Sala's Gift: My Mother's Holocaust Story by Ann Kirschner (Free Press, Nov.) | Mendel's Daughter: A Memoir by Martin Lemelman (Free Press, Oct.) | The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million by Daniel Mendelsohn (HarperCollins, Sept.) | |
| Format: | Illustrated memoir | Narrative with photos and letter facsimiles | Illustrated narrative | Narrative with photos |
| Author's relatives: | Her parents, Regina and Ben, Poles who met at Auschwitz | Her mother, Sala, who spent five years in seven Nazi work camps | His mother, Gupta, who grew up in Poland and escaped after hiding | Six of his relatives who disappeared during the Holocaust |
| Book draws on: | The memories of Eisenstein's parents and the stories of other family members lost in the war | Sala's letters, photographs and keepsakes | A transcription of Gupta's testimony; Lemelman's b&w drawings; and reproductions of photos, documents and other relics | A cache of letters written to the author's grandfather in 1939 and documentary photographs by the author's brother |
| Quote: | "There was no limit to how much you can socially trade on this stuff: Hey man, I'm different than you are. My parents were in Auschwitz. What do you have that can top that one?" | "In rare moments of retrospection, my mother would tell us about her arrival in the United States.... But even as a child, I was unconvinced. My mother was substituting a happy ending for an untold story." | "'My precious Martin,' [my mother] said, 'you now have 52 years. This is the same age from my father when he was murdered. Listen to me, Mattaleh! Sometimes your memories are not your own.' " | "Even later, after I was old enough to have learned about the war... it was hard to imagine just how they had been killed.... When? Where? How? With guns? In the gas chambers?" |
