The Watchmaker's Daughter: A Memoir - Softcover

Taitz, Sonia

Softcover

ISBN 10: 097556188X ISBN 13: 9780975561881

Publisher: McWitty Press, 2012

Synopsis

The Watchmaker's Daughter tells the story of a child of two refugees: a watchmaker who saved lives within Dachau prison, and his wife, a gifted concert pianist about to make her debut when the Nazis seized power. In this memoir, Sonia Taitz is born into a world in which the Holocaust is discussed constantly by her insular concentration camp-surviving parents. This legacy, combined with Sonia's passion and intelligence, leads the author to forge an adventurous life in which she seeks to heal both her parents and herself through travel, achievement, and a daring love affair. Ironically, it is her marriage to a non-Jew that brings her parents the peace and fulfillment they would never have imagined possible. Sonia manages to combine her own independence with a tender dutifulness, honoring her parents' legacy while forging a new family of her own.

About this title

About the Author

Sonia Taitz is the author of In the King’s Arms, a novel which was praised by the New York Times Book Review as “beguiling.” Vanity Fair essayist and critic Jesse Kornbluth dubbed Sonia Taitz the “the female, Jewish Evelyn Waugh” (surpassing Martin Amis and Philip Roth); ForeWord placed her in “in the province of the best poets, playwrights and novelists.” Her previous book, Mothering Heights, garnered Sonia Taitz praise as “an incisive, funny writer”(People) who is both “wise and witty” (Publishers’ Weekly); Mothering Heights was cited in O: The Oprah Magazine as “one of the best things ever written by famous writers on motherhood” (May, 2011).

The Watchmaker’s Daughter, a memoir, is the poignant tale of Sonia’s binocular life as the American child of European concentration camp survivors. In it, she is adult and child, daughter and mother&mdash but always the inspired interpreter of her special historical legacy.

Ms. Taitz earned a J.D. from Yale, and served as a Law Guardian for foster children and an ER advocate for assaulted women. She holds an M.Phil in English from Oxford, and won its Lord Bullock Prize for Writing. Her plays have been seen at the Oxford Playhouse, the National Theatre (in D.C.), New York's Primary Stages, and the Obie Award-winning Ensemble Studio Theatre, where she served as Writer-in-Residence.

Reviews

From the time Taitz was small, her parents’ stories about the Holocaust were “like telling me about the secrets of the cosmos.” Parts of this refugee family’s dynamics were competitions about which parent’s family had suffered most—“my life was worse than yours . . . you don’t know from suffering”—and, more happily, affection. When Sonia’s adored father pulled her toward him, “my joy was boundless—I had been ‘selected.’ Only then, chosen, did I feel fully alive.” Her Jewish home, “where even the walls were sighing,” makes her eager for an outside world and education. She realizes, however, that her promised land is not Yale Law School, and finally becomes her own “true self” while studying literature at Oxford. Even now, as the last Holocaust survivors pass away, wrenching reverberations run through Taitz’s poignant, poetic memoir. --Whitney Scott

Edition details

• Publisher: McWitty Press
• Publication date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 097556188X
• ISBN 13: 9780975561881
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256