Memoir, by a child of Holocaust survivors, of Jewish efforts to rebuild their lives in post-Holocaust america. Although a work of non-fiction, Salomon writes with a novelist's flair for description of people, places, and events that surround the tragic family background that her parents experienced.
In The Devil's Candy , Julie Salamon reported on the making of Brian DePalma's dead-in-the-water film version of Tom Wolfe's novel Bonfire of the Vanities . Here she gives us her own family's memoir, an altogether more personal report, but one which also begins in the film world. Invited to visit Steven Spielberg on the set of Schindler's List , Salamon asks her mother, Lily, to go along. Lily, herself a survivor of the concentration camps, "came through Auschwitz remarkably unscarred," writes Salamon. "Dropped into madness, she adjusted to madness." Once she saw Joseph Mengele, the infamous Nazi doctor, when he visited the camp. "He was good-looking," Lily tells her horrified daughter 50 years later, "though most men look very good in uniform."
Lily's normalcy is part pluck, part denial. Her Ohio-born daughter, by contrast, approaches this visit to the sites of the Holocaust with dread -- at her distance the evil of the Final Solution can only appear inhuman, monstrous, off-the-scale. The film set, with its artificiality in pursuit of real feeling, enhances the contrast. "The crematoria have been knocked down," Spielberg tells Salamon, "except for the one ABC built for ." On the set, the mother and daughter see a group of women, actresses in costume wearing frayed farm dresses and yellow Stars of David. Salamon is horrified to see these figures from the Holocaust come to life. Says her mother, "We never wore that kind of dress."
In the end, Lily forces herself to remember all the piercing details, the terrible betrayal of the war, and does so in order to help her daughter come to a just understanding of it. The two exchange their stories and their points of view. This moving, intimate and often funny memoir demonstrates how the stories we must make up to survive can bring us to the actual truth, after all. -- Salon
The author's father, Alexander (Sanyi) Salamon, a Carpathian Czech doctor, was incarcerated in Dachau and survived, but he lost his first wife and their small daughter in the Holocaust. In 1946, Alexander married the author's mother, Lilly (Szimi), a Czech Jew who had survived Auschwitz, where both her parents perished. Julie Salamon (White Lies ) begins this poignant family album with an account of the 1993 trip she made with her mother and stepfather to Poland, to the movie set where Steven Spielberg was filming Schindler's List . She interviews Spielberg, tours the concentration camps and tape-records her mother's memories of Nazi doctor Josef Mengele. The author's parents moved to New York in 1947, then in 1953 to an Appalachian Ohio village, where she was born and grew up. Her father died of cancer when she was 18. Beneath her girlhood's "Norman Rockwell trappings'' lay the tragic past her parents hid from her, a past she painstakingly reconstructs in this deeply affecting memoir. Photos not seen by PW. (Mar.)
Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly
Salamon (The Devil's Candy: "The Bonfire of the Vanities" Goes to HollywoodWall Street JournalSchindler's List . When at Auschwitz, Salamon begins to tell the story of her parents' survival, tracing her family history from her parents' childhoods to their eventual arrival in the United States. Salamon offers an excellent account of seeing the Holocaust through her parents' experiences, perceptively illustrating how it affected her own life. The result is interesting and well written, but readers may miss the immediacy of works like Elie Wiesel's classic Night (1958), Ernest Michel's Promises To Keep (LJ 9/15/93), or Rena Kornreich Gelissen's Rena's Promise (LJ 9/15/95), which are written by the survivors themselves. Recommended for larger libraries.-Mary Salony, West Virginia Northern Community Coll., Wheeling
Bonfire of the Vanities film chronicler Salamon (The Devil's Candy , 1991) leaves Hollywood for sadder and more personal venues as she searches, none too successfully, to understand her family's history.
Actually, Hollywood does put in a brief, distracting appearance in the person of Salamon's pal Steven Spielberg, whose filming of Schindler's List neatly coincides with Salamon's own excavation of her parents' Holocaust experiences on a trip to Eastern Europe. Her quest seems to be threefold: to understand her mother, Szimi, an optimistic, happy-go-lucky soul; her father, Sanyi, the ideal physician and "saint" of Adams County, Ohio; and the reason why these two Czech Jews, survivors of Auschwitz and Dachau, would settle in such a poor, remote town at the foot of the Appalachians. But while Salamon (formerly of the Wall Street Journal ) can gather all the information, her unusual parents elude her powers of penetration; each is reduced to a single, most salient quality. Szimi's breezy detachment may have helped her survive the wartime trauma of deportation, deprivation, and resettlement, first in Prague, where she met Sanyi, and then in America. But at its extreme, when she revisits Auschwitz, this every-cloud-has-a-silver-lining attitude is downright bizarre ("You know, if I hadn't gone through this place I probably wouldn't have led such an interesting life"). Sanyi (who died of cancer when Salamon was 18) remains a remote figure; admitting herself that she barely knew her father, she paints Sanyi primarily as a dedicated doctor whose long silences and deep rages were due to the loss of his first wife and daughter at the hand of the Nazis.
In the end, this narrative is at once too private and too impersonal—the reader floats on the surface of events and characters, unable to to enter into the Salamons' search for a safe place to raise their family.
