Synopsis:
Traces the courageous coming of age of a young Jewish woman under the influence of her parents' Holocaust experience, recorded in the fading photographs and film reels buried in her father's closet
Reviews:
Sucher debuts with a subtly affecting portrait of a young woman coming to terms with the reverberations of the Holocaust in her family. Rachel Wallfisch, a film producer and the daughter of Holocaust survivors, is soon to marry kind, wealthy Girard Stone. But when her mother's sister--beloved and stoical Tante Tsenyah, another victim of the camps--dies while she's in the midst of wedding preparations, Rachel is moved to think deeply about the past before she gets on with her own life. For Rachel, family history is made tangible by her father's old photographs and home movies--a collection of stories and images that first sparked her interest in film. As Rachel reflects on her first acquaintance with Aunt Tsenyah during her mother's bout with a mysterious neurological illness, she's haunted by thoughts of the events that followed: her mother's miraculous recovery and her later death in a car accident; the marriage and divorce of her rebellious older sister Emily, now a law student with three children; Rachel's own adolescent battles with her father over clothes, weight, and grades; and the dissolution of her relationship with Denny O'Halloran, the Irish Protestant she fell in love with--despite her father's disapproval--while studying film in England. She recounts, too, what she's learned over the years about her parents' early lives in Poland, especially the story of her father, who saw his mother and sister sent to their deaths and then, after the war, became close to a tough, prickly aunt he'd never met before. Throughout, Sucher portrays the effects of the Holocaust on Rachel's family--in their attitudes toward illness and death, in their feelings about Israel, and in the fierce, complicated love they feel for each other. Though it lacks a unified plot, the disjointed structure of this first novel seems appropriate to the piecemeal work of remembering, and Sucher's simple, graceful prose helps to make Rachel's story memorable and moving. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
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
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.
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