Eva and Eve: A Search for My Mother's Lost Childhood and What a War Left Behind

by Julie Metz Narrated by Rebecca Lowman

Overview

In this unforgettable and “essential feminist memoir of women's lives” (Sarah Wildman, author of Paper Love) the author of the New York Times bestselling memoir Perfection unearths her mother's hidden past in in Nazi-occupied Austria.

To Julie Metz, her mother, Eve, was the quintessential New Yorker. Eve rarely spoke about her childhood and it was difficult to imagine her living anywhere else except Manhattan, where she could be found attending Carnegie Hall and the Metropolitan Opera or inspecting a round of French triple crème at Zabar's.

After her mother passed, Julie discovered a keepsake book filled with farewell notes from friends and relatives addressed to a ten-year-old girl named Eva. This long-hidden memento was the first clue to the secret pain that Julie's mother had carried as a refugee and immigrant from Nazi-occupied Vienna, shining a light on “a story of political repression, terror, and dissolution...full of astonishing and unlikely twists of fate showing again that individual destiny may be the greatest mystery of all” (Dani Shapiro, author of Inheritance).

“A gripping and intimate wartime account with piercing contemporary relevance” (Kirkus Reviews), Eva and Eve lyrically traces one woman's search for her mother's lost childhood while revealing the resilience of our forebears and the sacrifices that ordinary people are called to make during history's darkest hours.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

"One of the most engrossing, educational, and emotional and yet effortless reads of the year....impossible to forget." "Good Morning America"

"A gripping and intimate wartime account with piercing contemporary relevance." —Kirkus

"Intriguing....Metz is a compelling narrator who offers thoughtful reflections on how her family's situation parallels today's world." Bookpage

"The story of this moving passion project resonates today, especially in light of the newest wave of American anti-immigrant sentiment and the COVID-19 pandemic. At its heart is a daughter seeking to understand her mother, forever shaped by those terrible years." Booklist

"Inspired by a collection of keepsakes, Metz unearths a chapter of her mother's hidden past, deftly navigating between two spheres: her family's harrowing escape from the Nazis, and her own present-day world—one steeped in research and introspection, and replete with political red flags weighed against those of the Third Reich. A timely and deeply layered investigation." — Georgia Hunter, author of We Were the Lucky Ones

“Three generations of women—grandmother, mother, daughter—illuminate how history is lived and worlds overlap, filtered through families and passed down from one era to the next. Metz writes, with great insight, about how her mother’s escape from Nazi-occupied Vienna to New York City—full of unexpected twists and turns—has echoed through her own life and her daughter’s, down to the present moment. This journey of discovery and reclamation could hardly be more timely and resonant.” —Adrienne Brodeur, bestselling author of Wild Game: My Mother, Her Lover, and Me

“Julie Metz’s Eva and Eve is a beautifully written ode to her mother who escaped the Nazis as a child in Vienna in 1940. With an artist’s eye for detail and a detective’s tenacity, Metz brings to life four generations of her family with great sensitivity and intelligence, and offers a timely meditation on political power gone awry.” —Helen Fremont, national bestselling author of After Long Silence and The Escape Artist

“Interweaving past and present, blending research and imagination, Julie Metz’s memoir crafts a portrait of an elusive mother with a bifurcated life. In her search for the threads of half-told stories and hidden treasures, Metz discovers an absorbingly complex family legacy. An illuminating and textured book.” —Elizabeth Rosner, author of Survivor Café: The Legacy of Trauma and the Labyrinth of Memory

“Upon her mother Eve’s death in New York, Julie Metz embarks on a journey to the Vienna of the child Eva, who faced the terror of Nazism. We learn of the emotional connections of this middle-class family to its home and of Julie’s complicated relationships with her mother and her own daughter. Using intrepid detective work and inspired imagination, Metz immerses the reader in interwar Jewish life and culture as it intertwined with Viennese society. She skillfully weaves a poignant family history of loss, escape, and refugee life as she evokes the sights, smells, and tastes of her mother’s lost childhood.” —Marion Kaplan, author of Hitler’s Jewish Refugees: Hope and Anxiety in Portugal

“Weaving together a lyrical exploration of her maternal family history—first as persecuted Jews in Austria, then as struggling immigrants in America—with poignant meditations on her own personal growth and trauma in an era of resurgent, reactionary nationalism, Metz illustrates the persistence of old, human evils, and the inspiration we can find for our own battles in the stories of resilient forebears.” —George Prochnik, author of The Impossible Exile: Stefan Zweig at the End of the World

“Eva and Eve is a beautiful memoir about all the ways history shapes a family. Metz's meditation on her mother's escape from Nazi Vienna, and the world of her ancestors that was left behind, is an important exploration of the past, but also a warning for the future. This is a devastating and important book, one that should be required reading.” —Danielle Trussoni, bestselling author of Angelology and The Ancestor

“Keeping secrets was a virtue for many in the Silent Generation and they died without ever revealing themselves to their puzzled, frustrated children. With a combination of dogged research and emotional archeology, Julie Metz has uncovered a nearly lost world, and in doing so, she has found the Viennese childhood that formed her mother's character.” —Mary Doria Russell, author of The Sparrow and A Thread of Grace

“With a historian’s scrupulous research and a novelist’s inventive power, Julie Metz has delivered a gripping and moving account of her mother’s narrow escape from the Nazis. It is an indelible story of both what was gained and what was lost in the exodus from Vienna to New York.” —Prof. Samuel G. Freedman, Columbia Journalism School, author of Breaking the Line and Who She Was

“Eva and Eve maps a wide arc, pulling a Jewish family’s past in wartime Vienna into the present era with vivid and dramatic detail. The story of political repression, terror and dissolution, then arrival and retrieval in a new country, is full of astonishing and unlikely twists of fate, showing again that individual destiny may be the greatest mystery of all. Metz’s journey to recover the past offers a model for connection and self-understanding—as well as a testament to the strengths of an America that is just and fair to all.” —Dani Shapiro, author of Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

“Julie Metz’s Eva and Eve is a touching homage to her mother who escaped the terror of Nazi Austria as a child, creating herself anew as an American in America. This is a work of startling eloquence and beauty, in its archeological excavation of four generations of a Jewish family and its literary depiction of how the broad sweep of history is threaded into the intricate drama of ordinary human lives.” —Lan Cao, author of Family in Six Tones and Monkey Bridge

"Equal parts beautifully-wrought memoir and mystery, Eva and Eve is the spellbinding intergenerational story of what it means to survive the trauma of impending tragedy and to keep it from the people you love most in the world. Julie Metz has pieced together the story of her beloved late mother's childhood in and escape from Nazi-occupied Austria, her own place in the story they shared as mother and daughter, and what it means to go to any length to save one's family in the face of unspeakable xenophobic horror. A masterpiece that I couldn't put down." - Elissa Altman, author of Motherland

Library Journal

02/26/2021

In her second book, graphic artist Metz dives into her complicated relationship with her mother—or rather, how she came to know more about her mother after her death. This territory is as personal as her New York Times-best-selling first book (Perfection: A Memoir of Betrayal and Renewal), which dealt with her discovery of her husband's infidelity after his death. Metz doesn't shy away from difficult topics, including her Jewish mother and grandparents barely escaping from Nazi Vienna. The author digs into her mother's difficult past, piecing together her family's prewar history and journey to the United States over the course of more than a decade, so that the author's own story is told alongside her mother's. Where historical records don't exist, Metz imagines scenes that might have happened, including her Viennese family's holiday celebrations and vacations, and even her grandparents' honeymoon. VERDICT Well-researched and engagingly written, this book offers up an interesting mix of memoir and family history. Recommended for readers who enjoy any of those topics, it should also appeal to those with an interest in World War II, Jewish history, and narrative nonfiction.—Crystal Goldman, Univ. of California, San Diego Lib.

Kirkus Reviews

2021-07-01
In this memoir, a woman seeks to understand her mother’s final two years in Vienna—when she was restricted to her family’s apartment—and her first years in New York City as a young immigrant who escaped Nazi-occupied Austria.

In 1940, Eva Singer was just shy of 12 years old when she and her parents, Julius and Anna, were able to secure their American visas. Eva changed her name to Eve and tucked the trauma that shaped her life into mostly unspoken memory. After Eve’s death in 2006, Metz discovered, secreted deep in her mother’s dresser drawer, a keepsake book from 1938 through 1940. Known as a Poesiealbum, it contained a collection of signatures and good wishes from childhood friends and family, most of whom probably never survived the Holocaust. “Almost from the beginning,” the author writes, “my search felt like a séance, a conversation she and I never had when she was alive. A collaboration with a ghost.” Over the subsequent years, Metz made several trips to Vienna, networked with archival agencies and experts, and immersed herself in the physical, cultural, and gastronomic experiences of Vienna. In 2019, she took a van from Vienna to Trieste, Italy, in an approximate duplication of the Singers’ journey to the ship that would carry them to freedom, the Saturnia, eventually even acquiring a copy of the captain’s log from that voyage. Metz’s memoir is an elegant, evocative construction of chilling historical details, travelogue-style descriptions of present-day Vienna and Trieste, and imagined vintage vignettes that give texture and depth to the distinctive experiences of her mother and grandparents. Like many Holocaust-themed retrospectives, the Singer family’s story simultaneously speaks to the tales of millions of others caught in the horrors of World War II, most of whom could not obtain the lifesaving visas. The author also skillfully connects the inflamed passions of the 1930s and ’40s with the reemergence of the incendiary, xenophobic American White nationalist rhetoric and violence of today. Occasionally the narrative succumbs to some repetition as Metz meanders between past and present, but the story remains riveting.

A gripping and intimate wartime account with piercing contemporary relevance.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940177233789
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster
Publication date:	04/06/2021
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Eva, at Nine Eva, at Nine
I’VE NEVER MET this sweet child who smiles at me with the confidence of a well-loved daughter. She is pretty, well-groomed, well-fed. Her dress, purchased or perhaps sewn at home for winter family celebrations, is of a floral material, with puffed sleeves and large round buttons, trimmed in white lace at its high ruffled collar. Her dark, shiny hair is cut short, above her chin, her bangs neatly pinned to one side. If I visited her school I’d see an entire classroom of nine-year-old girls who part and pin their hair the same way. She poses on her own in a comfortable sitting room, but in her easy gaze I sense the presence of other people: parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, family friends, and the unknown photographer. Behind her, a few hints of the room’s décor—rounded backrest of an elegant wood chair, sideboard decorated with a lacy cloth, door framed in carved molding against a patterned wallpaper—all recede in layers of gauzy focus.

What is it about this girl? She seems at once so innocent, yet so knowing. Her plump cheeks are incarnadine, like a morsel of blush-tinted marzipan, yet something about the intensity of her dark eyes tells me she is fiercer than her sweet presentation.

She will need that fierceness.

In two months this girl’s country will be taken over by a cohort of extremists led by an authoritarian germophobe who hates people of her kind. He sees them as filth, vermin, contamination. In truth there have always been people in her country who hated her ethnic group, but now their views will be fully validated and normalized.

In six months this well-appointed sitting room will be ransacked and most of the remaining possessions that aren’t shattered or stolen by an emboldened police force will be sold off so that the family can survive for the next two years.

The girl’s parents will spend those two years in a struggle against a mighty bureaucracy as they attempt to get out of a once-beloved city whose majority population now sees them as enemies of a new empire. Having lost all rights, the family will now be stateless.

Across the ocean, the latest incarnation of the xenophobic, isolationist America First movement is in full sway. Immigrants are suspect, even those who have thrown off most of their traditional customs in an effort to assimilate—to become Americans. People like this girl’s family are reviled for their mysterious religion, olive skin, and prominent noses. They cannot shake off their reputation as anti-Christian money-hoarders. They speak the language of America’s enemy and surely are spies, however desperately they and their political advocates plead for safe haven from persecution. America First is about protecting jobs from immigrants who will steal employment from true American citizens. America First means resisting engagement in the conflagration that threatens to engulf faraway lands. Let those foreign countries fight their own battles. Let some other place take the great masses of the persecuted and unwashed.

The girl looks at me intently and I meet her gaze. Eighty years have passed since a camera captured her face in the midst of a gentle winter afternoon. Now the gyres of history have revolved. Promoted by another would-be authoritarian and obsessive hand washer, America First is back, emblazoned on posters, T-shirts, and red baseball caps. Different immigrants from the east and south, just as desperate, just as feared and reviled for their dark skin, language, dress, religion, and all-round Otherness, plead for entry and are refused, in the name of national security. In the sweltering days of midsummer, parents and children are separated at the border or deported even as American farmers struggle to hire enough workers to pick fruits and vegetables. America has retreated from its European alliances and the walls of isolationism rise up like the wall an American president wants to build with taxpayer dollars. In an effort to stem the tide of immigrants, right-wing politicians have persuaded fearful British voters to leave the European Union. Other European governments teeter into anti-immigrant conservatism and authoritarianism. Ironically it is Germany’s chancellor who continues to uphold the postwar European order of liberal democracy.

I flip the photograph. On the reverse side a diligent family archivist has written “January 1938” in soft pencil. The nine-year-old girl in the frilly dress lived in Vienna, Austria, where a world of safety and comfort was about to end. Her name was Eva, and she was my mother. I knew her as Eve.

ON THE WINTER mornings of my childhood, crystalline waves of frozen condensation would cover the windowpanes of our city apartment like lichen on rock, blocking the street six floors below. When I pressed a warm fingertip to the frost, a tiny clearing appeared, like the porthole of a miniature ship. If I made enough of these ovals I could begin to make out a wavy image of the street through the veil of melted ice. This for me is the challenge of memory and memoir writing: we create small vistas from what we remember, and if we can create enough of them, we can begin to piece together a story from what we see. But the vistas, like those my finger made in the frost, can close up again. They might very well remain sealed for a lifetime.

When I first found a keepsake book way in the back of my mother’s lingerie drawer I thought I was looking only at a sentimental artifact from her childhood—something about which I knew too little.

Later, I remembered a high school history teacher who had pressed us students to consider the political, economic, and social implications of whichever event we were examining in class. To that end, I had subconsciously started thawing small portals long before I even understood that the keepsake book was part of something larger than my mother’s childhood, or our family history. It would take years and a political sea change for me to fully unravel its meaning.

THE REAL MIRACLE, one that kept me up at night during my childhood and into adulthood, is that they got out of Vienna at all, let alone with visas to the United States. Years after my mother’s death, the story still troubled me, that her life, and therefore mine, hung on such a slim thread of good fortune, one that was denied to so many equally worthy people deported to extermination camps. The luck of my family’s survival wasn’t entirely comforting, as it depended on the generosity or intervention of people I could never know: the employees at my grandfather’s printing factory, who produced an item of paper packaging vital to the Third Reich war effort; relatives in the United States who vouched for the Singer family and helped with the cost of boat tickets to America; a mysterious vice-consul at the United States consulate in Vienna who granted a visa; and perhaps even some Nazi officials who were open to negotiation or bribery.

My mother’s keepsake book felt like a challenge, as if she were asking me to tell our family’s story to those people of her adopted country, people who may have forgotten that we are a nation of both adventurers and reluctant refugees, and that there could be quiet greatness in following one woman’s journey from one name to another—from Eva to Eve.

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