a review of "Bending Toward the Sun"..and A Giveaway.

Bending Toward the Sun: A Mother and Daughter Memoir by By Leslie Gilbert-Lurie with Rita Lurie
(Harper Collins, ISBN 978-0061734762

In a way, this book contains two different stories, two different, interrelated stories. The first is the story of Rita, who was just 5 years old in Poland in 1942, when her family was driven from their home, to spend the next two years hiding in a neighbor's attic. The second is the story of the how her trauma has affected the generations that have come after her, her children and even her grandchildren.

The first third or so of the book is Rita's recount of her early years and a remarkable story it is. For two years, almost to the day, she and 14 other members of her extended family hid in a small attic, with barely enough food to keep them alive, constantly in fear that someone would turn them into the Nazis. They watched as other members of their family were shot in the farm yard, and they watched as Rita's baby brother and then her mother died in front of their eyes. But even when the war came to an end, the trauma was not over. For another 5 years, her family wandered through Europe, from displaced person camp to displaced person camp, finally ending up in Italy, waiting and hoping to get visas to come to the United States. Medical issues, no doubt related to her confinement and malnutrition, plagued young Rita and fractures in the once close family began to appear. Her father remarried a woman he met in the DP camp, herself a survivor of Auschwitz, a stepmother Rita always has had a bad relationship with. Then they come to the US, first NYC, then Chicago, and ultimately for Rita, California, where the young woman, now married to Frank Laurie, raised her own family..and deals to this day with her own demons, including, at times, crippling depression.

The second part of the story is that told by her daughter Leslie and explores the legacy of her mother's experience on herself and her siblings and on the next generation, Rita's grandchildren. As Leslie writes about herself and her own daughter Mikaela,

"I learned that as a result of trauma passing from one generation to the next, it was not unusual to find children of Holocaust survivors, or the "Second Generation," as we came to be known, weighed down by feelings of loss, guilt, and anxiety, and trapped in a dynamic of mutual devotion and overprotection between parent and child...There was something particularly resilient about the strain of fear Mikaela seemed to have inherited...Like me, Mikaela, too, seemed to be trapped in the vortex of a tragedy that had taken place a half century before she was born."

I am sorry to say I did not find this part of the book as interesting as the first or convincing in it's ideas about the affects of trauma on the next generation. And it is an argument that takes up a large part of the book. Certainly Rita, like many parents, have had to cope with horrible childhood experiences and without question, what has formed a parent, for good and bad, is passed on to the next generation in some ways. Simply from a biological point of view though, Rita has suffered from severe depression her whole life, but I am not sure there is a connection to her childhood experiences since it seems her father and perhaps the generation before also suffered the same issue.
But most of all, I am afraid that emphasis may paint a not positive enough picture of what Rita has been able to accomplish. Coming from a terrible childhood, a childhood with lingering effects and without a well adjusted home life to draw on as an example, she and her husband Frank (an unsung hero of this family I would have like to know more about maybe) were able to establish what seems like a very good marriage, a marriage strong enough to deal with some real problems over the years. And they were able to raise three very accomplished, very successful and pretty well adjusted children. Rita is a beautiful, accomplished woman in her own right that has had nightmares to deal with, but she seems to have done a great job doing it.

For me, that was the real message of this book. Not so much what is the lingering effect of horrible experiences, but rather how a strong woman can overcome so much. As the title of the book say and as Leslie says about her mother,

"This book was written with the hope that children and grandchildren of trauma survivors—as well as others facing their own challenges—might find inspiration in my mother's courageous story...The fire of hate that the Nazis lit did not consume everything. The earth was scorched, but from the blackened ground new seeds sprouted. Their genes had been affected by the intensity of the heat, but grow they did, and thrive they would, as my mother would put it, "bending toward the sun." It is evidence that despite the depth of pain and horror we may experience, the will of the human spirit is irrepressible, and the blessing of life, of a new day in the sun, will ultimately prevail."

For those who are interested in reading about the Holocaust, the aftermath in Europe after WWII and an interesting story about a family dynamic, "Bending Toward the Sun" is a book that I think you will want to put on your 'to be read' list.

And in order to help one lucky reader do that, I am going to offer my very, very gently read hard cover copy in a giveaway. Just say you are interested, in a comment, and leave your e-mail info so I can get in touch with you to find where to send it. The contest will run a week and the winner will be chosen the evening of Saturday 10/10. I would hope that the winner will pass on their own opinion of the book in their own review.

My thanks to Julie at FSB Associates for this copy.

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