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