Product Description

Lisa Appignanesi was born Elsbieta Borenztejn in Poland. Unlike other Holocaust survival memoirs, hers is the story of how the nucleus of the family survived outside the camps, beyond the ghetto and eventually made it to the new world - but still faced anti-semitism in post-war Catholic Quebec.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #368104 in Books
• Published on: 2000-04-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 232 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
After a lifetime spent steadfastly ignoring her parents' accounts of their struggle for survival in World War II Poland, novelist Lisa Appignanesi played the "ultimate generation game" as her mother's increasing old age impelled her to discover the truth about her family's past. Growing up as part of an immigrant Jewish family in Canada, she had recoiled at "the implicit message...that you could live through terrible things and come out at the other end to sip a glass of tea or Schnapps". Yet years later she found herself en route to Poland to "excavate" for herself the story of her parents' amazing endurance--and to reclaim her family history.

Appignanesi's parents Hena and Aron, together with her older brother and maternal grandmother, had escaped certain death in the Warsaw ghetto by tenacity, audacity (especially on the part of her mother)- -and the ultimate suppression of their Jewish identity. To this end they were helped out enormously by the heroism and sacrifices of individuals and in particular by Hena's mysterious, fabled brother Arek, who disappeared from view in 1943. Losing the Dead swings effortlessly between Appignanesi's comedic childhood reminiscences, her tireless search through Polish archives and registers for forgotten identities and the dramatic, immediate narrative of her family's day-to-day existence in the terrifying war years. It is a story of loss and deprivation, yet ultimately one of profound understanding, as Appignanesi resurrects her past in order to lay it to rest, proving that Losing the Dead is a truly commemorative memoir.--Catherine Taylor

Customer Reviews

Fascinating
This is a wonderful book, because it shows how individuals affect each other. There are mysteries at the beginning and the end, there are no easy resolutions, but the author manages to show us her parents so clearly that you entirely see how she herself was brought up. The other fascinating thing about it is that she makes it clear how relationships can be simulataneously successful and damaging, and how ultimately, however much we have been influenced by our families, we must take responsibility for ourselves and our own moral decisions. The depiction of the author's mother in particular is amazing - it encapsulates all the admiration and ambivalence so many of us seem to feel for our mothers. A resonant book.