The Watchmaker's Daughter: A Memoir
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