Search query: when we were strangers pamela

Product: We Were Strangers: The Story of Magda Preiss

Book Synopsis

We Were Strangers is the true story of Magda Preiss, a breathtaking masterpiece of Holocaust literature, composed in her own words upon arriving in America in the 1940s. Lived and told by a beautiful young bride with fearless defiance, Magda’s harrowing experience reveals a character who is larger than life and death. Hers is a love story more complex than any happy-ever-after tale. It recounts the love of culture, beauty, and life itself that fueled Magda’s will to survive; the love for her husband that made her stay to face Nazi horror instead of escaping with her parents and siblings; and her love for strangers, whose humanity amidst the most inhumane circumstances illuminates every page through Magda’s heroic voice.
From an idyllic childhood in Czechoslovakia through the hells of Auschwitz, Birkenau, Bergen-Belsen, Ravensbrück, and Beendorf, Magda shows what it means to be a stranger at home and in foreign lands, to be estranged from loved ones and even from oneself as the world goes insane. In devastating sentences as sharp as barbed wire, Magda uncovers universal truths from her experience as a woman in the Holocaust. Then in words as sweet as an unexpected smile, she redeems our love of life. Dreamlike but all too real; dripping raw passion but unsentimental; righteous without moralizing—they don’t make books like this anymore, yet we need books like this now more than ever.

Product: When We Were Strangers: A Novel by Pamela Schoenewaldt (2011-01-25)

Product: When We Were Strangers: A Novel

“The people as real as your own family, and the tale realistic enough to be any American’s.”
—Nancy E. Turner, author of These is My Words

A moving, powerful, and evocative debut novel, When We Were Strangers by Pamela Schoenewaldt heralds the arrival of superb new voice in American fiction. A tale rich in color, character, and vivid historical detail, it chronicles the tumultuous life journey of a young immigrant seamstress, as she travels from her isolated Italian mountain village through the dark corners of late nineteenth century America. A historical novel that readers of Geraldine Brooks, Nancy Turner, Frances de Pontes Peebles, and Debra Dean will most certainly cherish, When We Were Strangers will live in the mind and the heart long after its last page is turned.