The Alchemy of Survival: One Woman's Journey (Radcliffe Biography Series) - Hardcover

John E. Mack; Rita Rogers

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0201126826 ISBN 13: 9780201126822

Publisher: Addison-Wesley, 1988

Synopsis

The story of a young girl who rescued herself and her family from a Nazi concentration camp, escaped two Communist regimes, and survived to use her firsthand knowledge of pain, hardship, and conflict to provide psychiatric counseling for children

About this title

From Publishers Weekly:

How Rogers, a victim of the Holocaust of World War II, survived the experience and built a fruitful professional and personal life is explored here. Mack, a psychiatrist at the Harvard Medical School and Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of T. E. Lawrence, narrates events in the life of his coauthor, a Romanian-born child psychiatrist at UCLA. Rogers, a Jew, was a teenager when she and her family were imprisoned in a Nazi internment camp. Her ingenuity in gaining work as a foundry laborer was to spare the lives of her family and provide the springboard for escape. Rogers became a medical student in Prague, endured years of poverty and statelessness until she emigrated to the United States in 1953. Hers is a heartening success story grounded in the legacy of the near destruction of Eastern European Jewry. Photos not seen by PW.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal:

Internationally known child psychiatrist Rogers grew up in Romania, the daughter of a prominent Jewish family. Her idyllic childhood came to an abrupt end with the arrival of Nazi troops, but the clever, courageous, and indomitable Rita survived to attend the University of Vienna Medical School, emigrate to America, and marry an American. Her story is indeed inspiring but told rather disjointedly by Harvard psychiatrist and Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Mack. While his focus is on "the way she transcended personal suffering, converting her experiences into resources from which to draw," his explication of Rogers's professional life seems overly sketchy. Recommended, however, as another moving Holocaust survival story, and an exceptional one. Marcia F. Fuchs, Guil ford Free Lib., Ct.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Addison-Wesley
• Publication date: 1988
• ISBN 10: 0201126826
• ISBN 13: 9780201126822
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 251