Old photographs, 16 mm film, audiotapes, and flashbacks are some of the props used as aids to memory in telling a haunting story of a young girl's rite of passage to adulthood. The daughter of Holocaust survivors, Rachael Wallfish is raised in comfortable postwar New York in an almost stifling environment filled with family stories of wartime atrocities told largely by her overbearing but charismatic father. When her mother dies of a cruel illness, Aunt Tsenyah comes from Israel and adds more layers to the family saga. Twenty years later, Rachael, now a successful film producer, is engaged to marry wealthy Girard Stone. She struggles with the tensions in her life?her mother's untimely death, the Nazi death camp stories that haunt her dreams, her occasional conflicted Jewish identity?in an effort to define her sense of self. A powerful debut novel written with humor and compassion by a daughter of Holocaust survivors; recommended for all library collections.?Molly Abramowitz, Silver Spring, Md.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Cheryl Sucher is the daughter of Holocaust survivors, as is Rachel Wallfisch, the protagonist of this imposing first novel. Rachel grows up on Long Island, reluctantly struggling to keep alive the suffering her parents experienced in the Lodz ghetto, Auschwitz, and Ravensbruck. Rachel must also deal with her mother's death and the advent of her aunt, who comes from Israel to help the family when the mother becomes ill. Sucher shifts the scene from the past to the present and from Europe to New York--the present involving a career as a film producer and a love affair and marriage. Tightly focused and deeply evocative, Sucher's novel shows us that a tragedy of such magnitude cannot end with those who experience it. She is a truly gifted writer. George Cohen
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