Mosaic: A Chronicle of Five Generations [Paperback]

Diane Armstrong (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 14, 2002

Starting in Krakow, Poland in 1890, and spanning more than one hundred years, five generations, and four continents, Mosaic is Diane Armstrong's moving account of her remarkable, resilient family. This story begins when Daniel Baldinger divorces the wife he loves because she cannot bear children. Believing that "a man must have sons to say Kaddish for him when he dies," he marries a much younger woman, and by 1913, Daniel and his second wife Lieba have eleven children, including six sons. In this richly textured portrait, Armstrong follows the Baldinger children's lives over decades, through the terrifying years of the Holocaust, to the present. Based on oral histories and the diaries of more than a dozen men and women, Mosaic is an extraordinary story of a family and one woman's journey to reclaim her heritage.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Although it has the epic sweep and emotional depth of a 19th-century novel, Diane Armstrong's absorbing family memoir centers around the 20th-century Holocaust that consumed the lives of six million European Jews. She begins with the dramatic moment in 1890 when grandfather Daniel Baldinger divorced his childless first wife because, the devout orthodox Jew explained, "if I can't doven in shule beside my sons, I won't have fulfilled my duty to God." Those sons and daughters (Daniel's second wife bore 11 children) came to maturity as the Nazis were exterminating Jews, often with the enthusiastic assistance of the Baldingers' Polish neighbors. Armstrong's father changed his name to Henryk Boguslawski, and her parents spent the war with baby Diane (born in 1939) pretending to be Catholics; their siblings employed other desperate tactics to escape the anti-Semites' grasp.

Armstrong seamlessly weaves a narrative history of those terrible years with the first-person recollections of her elderly parents, aunts, and uncles. This mosaic is further enriched by the meditations of Diane and her cousins, who scattered after the war with their surviving parents to Canada, the United States, Israel, and Australia (where Armstrong still lives). Giving their children a Jewish identity poses a challenge for Diane and her equally secular husband, and the book closes movingly with their son's fiancée telling them she wishes to convert: "Your religion has continued for thousands of years, and so many Jews have died because of it," Susan tells her in-laws. "I don't want to be the one to break the continuity." Armstrong's memoir vividly conveys that continuity, even as it is threatened by political events and personal conflicts. Her skillful blending of vibrant individual voices across the generations makes this memoir a touching tribute to the healing powers of storytelling as well as to the unquenchable human spirit. --Wendy Smith --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Armstrong's vivid, heartwarming family memoir begins with a shocking divorce. In 1890, in Krakow, her grandfather Daniel Baldinger asked for and received a divorce from his wife of 10 years, Reizel, because they had not yet had a child. (This was permissible under Jewish law.) Five years later, Baldinger's second wife gave birth to their first son, Avner. When her uncle Avner died in 1985, Armstrong decided to interview her five living aunts and uncles to piece together a "mosaic" of five generations of her family. Using novelistic techniques both in the arrangement of her material as well as her liberal use of imaginative details Armstrong offers a sprawling family history covering more then 100 years, several continents and scores of characters. Relying on the memories of her relatives (some of whom were in their 70s and 80s when she interviewed them), she displays strong dramatic instincts and can play a scene for all it's worth. Indeed, the book has a cinematic quality to it, particularly when it comes to her family's varied situations under the Third Reich: her immediate family posed as Catholics to escape the Nazis, but other relatives were not so lucky. Although Armstrong's tale is crammed with incident the secret of her mother's abortion in 1938; a tale of relatives in Auschwitz who met Anne Frank and her sister in the concentration camp where she died; a Catholic priest who helped her family in hiding the plot and her characters move along in a fast-paced, tightly woven narrative. Although readers looking for strictly documented history may find it wanting, Armstrong's story is likely to entertain and grip most readers.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 608 pages
• Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin (September 14, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312305109
• ISBN-13: 978-0312305109
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,232,154 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Simply the best Holocaust narrative., October 18, 2001

By 

L. Alper (Englewood CO) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Mosaic: A Chronicle of Five Generations (Hardcover)

I absolutely loved "Mosaic: A Chronicle of 5 Generations". I have read many Holocaust memoirs & oral histories, but none have moved me as Diane Armstrong's book has.

The strength of "Mosaic" is it's breadth and it's protagonists, the author's family. The central family, that of Daniel & Lieba Baldinger & their 11 children is augmented by cousins on the maternal side (the Spira's) as well as the family of Ms. Armstrong's mother, the Bratters. Although Poland is the setting for the first 30 years or so, as WWII beckons the scope becomes the entire continent of Europe as the now-adult children of Daniel & Lieba pursue their lives.

The majority of the family is caught in Nazi-controlled Poland & thru various ruses attempts to escape being deported to the death camps. These are the most thrilling sections of "Mosaic" because Ms. Armstrong's writing is so vivid that the reader can feel the never-ending fear that she & her family lived with for years. While she & her parents live as Catholics in a small Polish village, her aunt & young cousins are standing behind a wardrobe for days at a time in Krakow; we experience both types of anxiety as well as many others as the author recounts the many ruses various family members undertook to survive.

There were family members outside of Poland during WWII as well. With 2 uncles in France, another uncle who moved his family from Belgium thru Spain to finally end in Rio de Janeiro & various aunts & cousins everywhere from Andorra to Tel Aviv the reader is treated to a kaleidoscope of war experiences. The post-war years & family diaspora is dealt with in detail also.

What makes "Mosaic" especially memorable for me is that nobody is a "hero" or does "historic deeds" at any point in the book. While most Holocaust memoirs are by individuals who somehow stood out from the crowd, this account is of the members of that crowd, the folks who by simply surviving without compromising themselves became heroes. It is a marvelous reminder that everyone has a story worth telling.

The final chapter, in which Diane Armstrong & her daughter Justine return to Poland & reunite with the priest who befriended & helped her family shines with joy & compassion. I truly hope that Father Roman Soszynski had the opportunity to read this book. I hope that you will read it as well.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Interesting how the author's gender makes the book more real, August 3, 2010

By 

Mary McGreevey "frwhiskey" (SAn Francisco) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Mosaic: A Chronicle of Five Generations (Paperback)

Many Holocaust biographies and autobiographies seem to be written by men, and the male Jewish perspective often downplays the importance of the women's characters, desires, wishes, actions, decisions, motivations, work, education, etc. You can read this book with a certain delight in noting that she does not spare her male ancestors the usual jabs at character deficiencies that most male-written books aim at the women. For example, she tries to explain at least somewhat the submissive nature of her grandmother, Lieba, Daniel's second wife, who produced the 11 children and suffered from the sheer exhaustion of it. She interviews the grown children of this couple and gets the daughters' points of view on their father, that his sex drive must have been enormous. This is not the usual comment about a male ancestor in a Holocaust novel: too judgmental. That he was also too cheap and very harsh with his children, in spite of a good income from his pipe-installation business, is a grudge brought up countless times: she does not spare the males any criticism. She makes his endless consultation with rabbis on tough questions seem silly at best, dangerous at worst - not dealing with his children appropriately; instead, obsessing with the rules of religion rather than health and well-being.

These are the opening chapters of a long novel about a Polish Jewish family, their fight to survive the Holocaust after invasion of Poland, and their subsequent triumphs abroad. It's exciting reading, but permeated with a realism that an aware female descendant brought to her analysis of her own family. She openly admits that her aunts and uncles (these 11 kids) were not happy so much would be revealed about their real lives and its pettiness, cheapness, fighting and scraping.

As a reader whose own ancestors have the name Armstrong, I say BRAVO! to this author for telling us the truth of a less-than-happy Jewish family, so that they seem MORE REAL than the usual heroic-type stories. Not only is she eager to do so, she writes almost pell-mell headlong into things, as if chatting to us personally at a dinner table. One could criticize the writing as less than perfect, but that too, all the more, gives a wonderful feeling of hearing a true, uneditted family story.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a pivotal epic of suffering, survival and renewal in Jewish history., August 26, 2009

By 

Gary Selikow (Great Kush) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Mosaic: A Chronicle of Five Generations (Hardcover)

Diane Armstrong traces the history of her family over a hundred years in what is far more more than merely a family a saga but is indeed a pivotal epic of suffering, survival and renewal in Jewish history.
It explores the grand range of human emotions from hope, humour, friendship , love and tenderness to anger, fear, hate, pain and loss.

The real life epic begins in in Krakow, Poland, 1890 when the author's grandfather, when the author's grandfather ,Daniel Baldinger, divorces Reizel, his wife of ten years, because of their inability to produce children, and marries Leiba Spira, the pretty and industrious young daughter of a shopkeeper in his community.
Daniel and Leiba are blessed with a comfortable home and 11 fine children, and this well rounded and beautifully written account takes us through the generations of Dian Armstrong's family, imbibing the reader with the richness of Polish Jewish life, the hopes and trials of the family through the horrors and destruction of the Holocaust and the tenuous survival in hiding of the author as a three year old girl and her parents, posing as Polish Catholics, at the time when the discovery of their being Jewish would have meant certain death.
Through the courage of a young Catholic priest, Father Soszynski and a community that does not betray them, the author's family survive tenuously, against overwhelming odds.
The Nazis and their willing helpers had succeeded in destroying the Jews of Europe, only 250 000 Jews remained alive, of the 3 million that had lived in Poland. In the words of Diane Armstrong "In concentration camps, death camps, ghettos, forest groves, hillsides. villages and cities, six million innocent people had been gassed, beaten, tortured, mutilated, set on fire, buried alive and starved".
And after the war, those Jews that survived in Poland still lived in terror and insecurity. 1500 Jews were murdered by fellow Poles- tiny children were thrown through third floor windows, the wombs of pregnant women ripped open and old people and teenagers battered to death.
3 years after the war, the author, at nine years old, and her family, travelled by ship to Australia where they settled. The author recalls how they could not embark at Port Said, as five Arab armies had attacked the fledgling state of Israel, and in Egypt, as in the rest of the Arab world, all Jews were regarded as enemies.

Many of the author's family made their homes in Israel, as did the majority of Holocaust survivors, and Israel is the where the majority of the descendants of Holocaust survivors live today.
Diane Armstrong's cousin Krysia and her husband Marcel Ginzig describe the importance of making their home in Israel in the pioneering days of the 1950's at a time when ideals meant everything in Israel ,and regardless of material positions and professional status, everyone understood each other and shared a similar past and common goals.
As Marcel recounts "No power on earth can make me leave Israel. Maybe this sounds funny but I was afraid of being a Jew again. Here among Jews, I was an Israeli, I wasn't going to become a Canadian Jew. Maybe I would have been better off in Canada. Certainly I would have led a quieter safer life without wars, hostile Arabs and intifadas, and my granddaughters wouldn't be going into the army.
After the passing of Diane's mother, the author revisited Poland, to retrace her families past, and help fill in the gaps. Here she met Father Soszynski who had saved her and her family. she retraced most of her family's past there, and met with both hostility and friendliness from the people there.
Today there is much openness in Poland towards revisiting the past, and a ken interest among young Poles in Jewish history and culture, as well a strong alliance between the democracies of Israel and Poland. Also, as the author points out, 'Jewish blood runs silently and secretly through millions of Polish veins'