The Net of Dreams: A Family's Search for a Rightful Place [Hardcover]

Julie Salamon (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 12, 1996

The author of The Devil's Candy and White Lies--herself the daughter of Holocaust survivors--shares her family's stories: her mother's memory of Josef Mengele; her father's relocation to Ohio after the war; and her own Jewish upbringing in the heartland of America.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

A book that is as distinct as it is complex, The Net of Dreams follows the author's parents' journey from the camps of Auschwitz to the streets of a small town in Ohio. As she tries to piece together the elements of her family's history and their reinvented and rediscovered life in America, she uncovers and honors hidden stories, providing an unforgettable portrait of an American family.

From Publishers Weekly

The author's father, Alexander (Sanyi) Salamon, a Carpathian Czech doctor, was incarcerated in Dachau and survived, but he lost his first wife and their small daughter in the Holocaust. In 1946, Alexander married the author's mother, Lilly (Szimi), a Czech Jew who had survived Auschwitz, where both her parents perished. Julie Salamon (White Lies) begins this poignant family album with an account of the 1993 trip she made with her mother and stepfather to Poland, to the movie set where Steven Spielberg was filming Schindler's List. She interviews Spielberg, tours the concentration camps and tape-records her mother's memories of Nazi doctor Josef Mengele. The author's parents moved to New York in 1947, then in 1953 to an Appalachian Ohio village, where she was born and grew up. Her father died of cancer when she was 18. Beneath her girlhood's "Norman Rockwell trappings" lay the tragic past her parents hid from her, a past she painstakingly reconstructs in this deeply affecting memoir. Photos not seen by PW.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Random House; 1st edition (March 12, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679431217
• ISBN-13: 978-0679431213
• Product Dimensions: 9.8 x 6.2 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,706,378 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Net of Wonders, May 25, 2000

By 

Alyssa A. Lappen (Earth) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: The Net of Dreams: A Family's Search for a Rightful Place (Hardcover)

Julie Salamon is a friend and a person I respect mightily, so I am not exactly objective. Nevertheless, I found her discovery of her family's history--and her trip to the death camps with her mother--remarkable and so compelling that I was unable to put it down. I read the book in 1996 and though I buy, read and donate hundreds of books a year, this one remains in our library. It will be a good resource for our children as they learn of the effects of the Holocaust on us all--and of human ability to overcome horrors. Alyssa A. Lappen

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars amazing account of a family and it's history!, June 20, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: The Net of Dreams: A Family's Search for a Rightful Place (Paperback)

I have been searching for this book for several years and I have finally found it(I forgot the title so it's been a long search)!I read it years ago and was moved to tears many times. Ms. Salamon describes her mothers history in such a way that you feel like you were right there with her. You can feel her joy and her pain. You get to know her before the war touched her life and all the way through her move to America and the start of her family. This was the only book I have ever read that I could not put down! It's unbelievably good!

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars I'd give it 3.5 Stars ... A Moving Family History, April 3, 2007

By 

Barb Mechalke (in the lovely Finger Lakes Region of Upstate New York) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Net of Dreams: A Family's Search for a Rightful Place (Paperback)

There is so much in this book...the history of Julie Salamon's parents Szimi and Sanyi Salamon, Jewish Holocaust survivors, it is the story of their lives before the war, what they endured and lost during the war, how they survived and met and ended up creating a nice 'American' family.

Julie Salamon's personal journey includes many interesting anecdotes, a detailed family tree and insight in to her mother's seemingly neurotic ideas about life. Her mother possessed this amazing insanity, where she was able to think the wonderful while enduring the unspeakable.

I thought it was so interesting to hear how Jews who survived the Holocaust would express distain for other surviving Jews because they were Polish or Hungarian or Russian. It seems that this pecking order that we endure and perpetrate against others is sometimes what gets us through our lot in life.

Julie, her mother and step-father take a trip to Poland to visit in Huszt and tour Auschwitz. During their travels her mother tells her many stories of her experience during her imprisonment in the concentration camp, things she never spoke of before. I thought it so insightful to describe the time after liberation as Genesis Day One, a vast re-creation.

I thought this was a very well told and well written history. My only criticism is that I felt this story was unfinished. Of course it's her life and she living so to a certain extent I certainly expected her story to continue after the book was done. But I was left to wonder how did her mother cope with the death of her father. How did she find her second husband Arthur? Did her mother find any peace in going back to Poland and Auschwitz?

Perhaps she will write another book so I can find out!