The Pages In Between: A Holocaust Legacy of Two Families, One Home [Hardcover]

Erin Einhorn (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 9, 2008

Now available in paperback: “a moving account of one woman’s brave journey as she confronts her mother’s past in the cold reality of the present. Einhorn has written a unique holocaust story—part testimony and part detective story” (Martin Lemelman, author of Mendel’s Daughter).

First aired as a segment of This American Life entitled “Settling the Score,” The Pages in Between is the moving story of Einhorn’s personal journey of reconciliation and discovery in modern-day Poland. Frustrated by her mother’s refusal to talk about her tragic and unusual childhood, Einhorn traveled to Poland to find the family that safeguarded her from the Nazis as an infant. What she uncovered was the legacy left behind by a sixtyyear- old promise made by her grandfather: to give the family that harbored her mother during the war everything he had—most importantly the deed to his own family’s house. In her attempt to fulfill that debt that saved her mother’s life, Einhorn comes face to face with the realities of present day Poland, where a dispute of this kind requires endless digging through painful and often hidden history. Along the way, she suffers her own personal losses and begins to question how much of the future should be jeopardized in order to right the wrongs of the past. Part family history, part personal and present coming of age memoir, The Pages in Between powerfully tells of a young woman’s quest for the “truth” about her mother’s life, and of learning the lesson that this truth might be impossible to find.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Journalist Einhorn's mother, Irena, was born in the Jewish ghetto of Bedzin, Poland, in 1942. A year later, as Irena's parents were being sent to concentration camps, her father made a deal with a Polish woman to hide Irena in exchange for his property. Irena's mother died at Auschwitz, but her father survived, and after the liberation met Irena in Sweden to go to America. As an adult, Einhorn decided to return to Poland to find her grandfather's house, hoping she might also meet the Polish woman who'd hidden Irena. As Einhorn worked on her family quest, she explored the somewhat surreal world of modern Polish-Jewish relations—from concentration camp tourism to faux-Jewish nightclubs featuring raucous renditions of Hava Nagila. Einhorn's earnestness serves her well in this beautifully told, genuinely inquisitive memoir; she insists on trying to do right by the Polish family who hid her mother, even if they only did it for money. (Sept.)
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From Booklist

Einhorn went to Poland to learn the facts of her Jewish mother’s childhood because her mother always refused to tell her what had happened. It’s the story of how a Polish Christian woman saved her mother’s life, how she lived with a foster family in Sweden, and her transatlantic trip to the U.S. with a father she hardly knew. Einhorn located the son of the woman who saved her mother, Wieslaw Skowronski. He told her that Erin’s grandfather had promised the Skowronskis their house in exchange for hiding his daughter, obligating the author to search through a massive collection of archives. In this memoir, Einhorn examines the significance of family and how memory sometimes clouds the truth. An important and haunting work. --George Cohen

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Touchstone; 1 edition (September 9, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1416558306
• ISBN-13: 978-1416558309
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.5 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,129,131 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Erin Einhorn is a reporter for the New York Daily News where she covers issues, policies and events in the nation's largest public school system. She has written for the Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia Daily News, and Fortune. A contributor to public radio's This American Life, Einhorn's story was the basis for one of the show's most popular episodes. She lives in New York City.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Unique Holocaust Story, September 30, 2008

By 

A Reader "booklover" (MN, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Pages In Between: A Holocaust Legacy of Two Families, One Home (Hardcover)

A Jewish baby is born in a Polish ghetto in 1942. In an attempt to save her life, her father asks a Polish gentile woman to look after his young daughter, telling her that he'll be back after the war. Indeed he does return and these two are some of the only members of their family who survive the holocaust. The frightened little girl and her father, a stranger to her, go to Sweden for a few years and then on to the United States where this little girl grows up, marries, and becomes a mother.

Erin Einhorn, a reporter, must have known she had quite a story on her hands, or at the very least a fascinating family history, because the little girl in the story was her mother, Irene Rozenblum Einhorn. Despite her mother's long reluctance and disinterest in speaking of her past, Einhorn is determined to find out who this family is who saved her mother and made her own life possible. This story has become The Pages in Between, an honest and revealing memoir which winds up going in a direction that most holocaust writing does not. Einhorn moves to Poland and is surprised to find that in this country that was ten percent Jewish before WW2, Judaism has now become trendy. There are Jewish restaurants and trinket shops and tours one can go on.

Einhorn visits Bedzin, the previous home of her family, and quite easily finds the house they used to live in, and in it, the family that saved her mother's life, the Skowronskis. The woman who cared for her has died, but her son lives there with his family. He remembers the little girl he thought of as his sister whom they had always hoped would return for a visit. Einhorn visits the family multiple times, taking a translator with her, and over time some frustration on the part of the Skowronskis is revealed. Einhorn learns there is a problem with ownership of the house, and the Skowronskis want to collect on a promise made by Einhorn's grandfather during the war.

Einhorn tries to do what she can to help them, and it turns out to be a terribly complicated and potentially expensive legal matter. At the same time, Einhorn is struggling with the somewhat turbulent relationship she has always had with her mother as well as some life-altering news.

I found this to be a quite compelling story and I enjoyed Einhorn's personal tone throughout the book. I was very impressed with the degree to which she tried to assist the Skowronskis. I felt as though they were giving her a pretty hard time and it would have been easy for her just to walk away. It's an interesting question, really. After what happened in the Holocaust, do people really owe each other for saving a life, or was it just the right (and obviously brave) thing to do? Who should property belong to? The people it was stolen from over 60 years ago, or the people who have since made it their own?

I found this to be a fascinating and unique story and recommend it.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Memoir and travelgue through contemporary Poland, December 16, 2008

By 

Helen Epstein "helen epstein" (massachusetts) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Pages In Between: A Holocaust Legacy of Two Families, One Home (Hardcover)

The Pages in Between is a journalistic memoir and Einhorn makes the

most of this emerging and very elastic form of non-fiction. After

a mother-daughter road trip in which she learns new details about her mother's early life as a "hidden child" during the Holocaust, Einhorn rents a room in Krakow with two young Poles, researches Polish-Jewish history as well as the history of her own family, then finds and interviews the descendants of the woman who hid her mother. The past she uncovers is far messier and more complicated than Einhorn imagined. There is real estate involved; promises allegedly made; the intricacies of Polish property law. Einhorn sometimes seems like a Henry James heroine caught in a web of sinister European intrigue but the twist is that she's at the dead end of a sometimes benign but often brutally violent history of Polish Jewry. No traveler can escape the ads for genocide tourism (Auschwitz-Birkenau! Klezmer in Kazimierz!) in Krakow. A major part of the local economy is based on Jews visiting the sites of extermination and/or trying to document their family histories, paying locals finding their way in the new capitalism. In what I imagine must have been a long hard struggle to shape this book, Einhorn chooses to include all these elements in a memoir jam-packed with reportage, interesting characters, unexpected humor in the midst of grief, and conflicting memories - individual and collective. The book provokes many more questions than it can explore, let alone answer. A great debut book.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Courtesy of Mother Daughter Book Club.com, December 30, 2008

By 

Cynthia Hudson (Portland, OR) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Pages In Between: A Holocaust Legacy of Two Families, One Home (Hardcover)

In The Pages In Between, Erin Einhorn has written a memoir about what she finds when she searches for the Polish family that sheltered her Jewish mother during World War II.

When she was growing up in Detroit, Einhorn didn't know much about her mother's past until she wrote a paper on the topic when she was in high school. Her mother, Irena, offered only the basics: Born in the early 1940s, Irena's mother died during the war, while her father, Beresh, survived. Before he was taken away to a concentration camp, Beresh offered a local woman money and his home to live in if she would keep Irena safe. After the war, Beresh returns and makes his way with his daughter and new wife first to Sweden then to the U.S., where he made a new life.

When Erin, Irena's daughter, became a journalist, her reporter's mind refused to let go of her mother's story, and she wanted to learn more. Taking a sabbatical from her job, she moved to Poland to see if she could find her mother's rescuers. In the story of her quest, Einhorn mixes historical fact with current cultural observations with details of her journey to create a fascinating account that is very personal, yet universal in many ways as well.

The story will touch a chord with anyone who has ever wondered about the people who came before them: where did they live, what motivated them, how were their lives different from ours? There's genealogical research and observations about Jews in Poland. Einhorn takes a look at historical attitudes of Poles to Jews and how lingering feelings of distrust resulting from the Holocaust continue to this day. But she also looks at how this generation of young Poles is different from the one that came before, and she candidly assesses the differences.

I think The Pages in Between is not just the story of one woman's search for her mother's history. It taps into the yearning that many of us feel about understanding our mothers and ourselves by looking at the events that helped shape us into who we are. I recommend it for mother-daughter book clubs with daughters in 10th grade and older.