Forbidden Family: A Wartime Memoir of the Philippines, 1941-1945 (Wisconsin Studies in American Autobiography) - Hardcover

Sams, Margaret

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0299121402 ISBN 13: 9780299121402

Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Pr, 1989

Synopsis

Written just five years after the end of World War II, this is Margaret Sams’s moving testimony of life in a Japanese internment campâ the can of Spam hoarded for Christmas dinner, the clandestine radio hidden in her sewing kit, the beheading of other prisoners for transgressions. With her husband held elsewhere as a prisoner of war and with a small son to protect, Margaret broke the rules both of society and of her captors to fall in love and bear a child with a kind and daring fellow internee, Jerry Sams.

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Reviews

With lingering guilt but with pride and defiance, Sams, a San Francisco Bay area housewife, defends her illicit love and child born in a Japanese internment camp during the occupation of the Philippines. Edited by Bloom, a University of Connecticut professor, this suspenseful account is intended to explain the author's conduct to her children. She recalls that, separated by the war from her husband (who was later killed), she fell in love with a fellow internee, bore his child and cared for her clandestine family, which included her own four-year-old son as well as the infant daughter, for three years under brutal conditions, fighting starvation and disease and braving disapproval and hostility of many inmates. The "illicit" pair later married and are now grandparents. The editor's analysis adds little to the impact of a dramatic story. Photos not seen by PW.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

For thousands of American civilians in the Philippines, World War II brought internment in Japanese camps where life was harsh and precarious. In this stunning memoir, Sams, a young woman of uncommon mettle, provides a starkly honest and unsparing account of her experience. It is at once a war story, a love story, and a feminist affirmation. She chronicles her transformation from an ordinary small-town girl into a courageous and self-reliant woman who defied public censure by falling in love with and bearing the child of the man (Jerry Sams) whom she met in camp while her first husband was a prisoner of war. Her memoir vividly conveys a sense of camp life and of the skills necessary for survival in such a setting.
- Steven I. Levine, Duke Univ., Durham, N.C.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Pr
• Publication date: 1989
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0299121402
• ISBN 13: 9780299121402
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336
• Editor: Bloom Lynn Z.