Thanks to My Mother

In a poignant autobiographical account, a child gratefully thanks her mother who, by the use of her wits and courage, managed to keep her alive throughout their long period of imprisonment at the Vilinius ghetto and concentration camps during World War II.

Grade 8 Up?Rabinovici recounts in exacting detail how the Holocaust decimated her large, extended Lithuanian family. She was only eight years old when Hitler's army invaded Vilnius, a once-vibrant center of Jewish learning and culture. Staying one step ahead of the Nazis and their Lithuanian and Polish sympathizers, her family migrated from one house to another until they were caught and herded with 10,000 other Jews into a barbed-wire ghetto where they endured starvation, sickness, torture, and bitter cold. From the ghetto prison, the surviving members of her family were transported to a labor camp after narrowly avoiding being sent to a concentration camp and certain, immediate murder. Only three family members survived the ordeal. One was her mother, who through cunning, courage, and will saved the author from death countless times. Although the narrative is written in a controlled, even tone, the harrowing experiences described here are hard to forget. Especially helpful to teen readers are the many brief footnotes explaining Yiddish expressions and Jewish customs that appear in the text. The book is clearly one of the most instructive and moving memoirs that have emerged from the Holocaust. It is both a living testament to the incomprehensible reality of the Holocaust and the author's tribute to her heroic mother.?Jack Forman, Mesa College Library, San Diego
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Particularly grim, even for a Holocaust memoir, this work owes much of its force to the author's unusually detailed powers of memory. Only eight when Germany occupied her home city of Vilnius in Lithuania, Rabinovici endured nearly two years of extreme privation in the Jewish ghetto established by the Nazis and spent the balance of the war in concentration camps. As her title indicates, she owes her survival to her mother, a fast-thinking realist whose courage and ingenuity were bolstered by family wealth and extensive contacts. Rabinovici is unsparing in her recollections: she describes "selections" during which babies abandoned by their mothers are trampled by the crowds; bathhouse abortions; a hellish journey in the cargo deck of a ship, where the passengers are sprayed with feces and vomit. The only concession to young readers appears to be footnotes that define religious, political and historical terms. The writing suffers from repetition and a stiff style?perhaps a reflection on the book's original composition in German, not the author's native tongue (although she has made her home in both Tel Aviv and Vienna since 1964). Too, the author lacks the redemptive vision of, for example, Livia Bitton-Jackson in I Have Lived a Thousand Years. But readers?adults or youths?whose interest in Holocaust testimonies does not pivot on literary polish and who are mentally prepared for the harshness of Rabinovici's experiences will come away with renewed appreciation of the extraordinary fortitude and fortune required to survive in those dire times. Ages 13-up.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.