on The Pages In Between
Read Online The Pages In Between Authored By Erin Einhorn Formatted As Audio Books
felt like this book was a good follow on after reading Neighbors, about the city in Poland where the Polish half the town murdered the Jewish half.
The author travels to Poland in search of her mothers roots, To find out what happened when she was hidden as a child by a Polish family, Along the way she talks about how Poles feel about Jews today and how there is a variety of views but mostly positive feeling about the Jews.
Nevertheless, feelings of Jews who left Poland, and their families who know their stories, remain resentful, And this is fair in many cases, Most young adults in Poland did not grow up with Jews because they had been chased out or killed off, Their view, though positive, is frequently tinged with nostalgia for cultural diversity they've never experienced but imagine only the positive aspects of,
The author's story about her family and discovering that the way her mother described her childhood and how it actually was did not always match up.
It is interesting how sometimes unhappy children see their past very differently that others see it, I first heard Einhorn's story on NPR on This American Life,
Einhorn's mother was sheltered by a Polish family during the holocaust, In exchange for saving his infant daughter, Einhorn's grandfather bequeathed the family home, Sixty years later Einhorn travels to Poland to visit the family that took her mother into hiding and who still reside in the same home.
So begins the tangled web of Einhorn's journey into deciphering what actually happened, The story is complicated and full of bureaucracy,
Einhorn's mother is very uncooperative in detailing information for Erin, wanting to put that period of her life behind her, Even after thorough and painstaking research, the author unearths very little information and becomes mired in complexities without providing much substance to deliver a cohesive conclusion.
I found the authors examination of Polish and Jewish history and modern day relations interesting and educational,
This story was captivating as an NPR piece and would have also been a fascinating short story, but based on the actual facts that Einhorn was able to unveil, it made for a less than satisfying book.
In a unique, intensely moving memoir, Erin Einhorn finds the family in Poland who saved her mother from the holocaust, But instead of a joyful reunion, Erin unearths a dispute that forces her to navigate the increasingly bitter crossroads between memory and truth,
It's a subject near and dear to my heart, So on that level, I found the book extremely satisfying, I found this story of a woman's effort to find out the truth about her mother's tale of holocaust survival to be fairly engrossing, It showed how family events that one thinks are confined to the past can end up having real emotional, personal and legal ! consequences in the present day.
The author went looking for answers but only came away with more ambiguity and questions,
It was also interesting in that it showed how broad historical events can affect the lives of real people, and that these traumas don't only affect those who lived through them, but also touch the generations who come later.
In this way, it reminded me of sitelinkBeloved,
The genealogy aspect was also very interesting makes me want to do some research on my own family! A professional journalist, Einhorn exhibits remarkable objectivity in dealing with what has heretofore been a touchy, painful, and irritating subject to people on both sides of the equation.
See the many passionate, argumentative reviews on Amazon of "Maus" or "Fear: AntiSemitism in Poland After Auschwitz, "
Far from being an apologist for either side, Einhorn recounts valid examples of Polish antiSemitic incidents that led many Jews to condemn all Poles in perpetuity.
However, she reaches beyond the kneejerk reaction and indoctrinated posture of earlier generations of Jews, who taught their children to hate all Poles for the actions of some, or bought into those prejudices without any objective considerations of their own.
Even Newsweek magazine once ran an editorial describing Poles as "inherently" antiSemitic, inferring some freakish genetic predisposition to hate Jews,
Einhorn reaches back into the Middle Ages, reminding Jewish readers that it was a Polish king who opened the doors of his then mighty nation to the Jews, who were being slaughtered in every other European nation at the time.
This was the reason that so many Jews were living in Poland when the Nazi holocaust hit because they'd thrived in Poland for centuries, She also compares the situation of Poles during WWagainst other occupied European peoples, people who collaborated more freely with the Nazis, suffered much less than the Poles did under Nazi occupation, yet were given a pass by Jewish historians.
She covers all sides of the arguments as they played out in her head, applying her journalistic objectivity to her own subjective conscience as she weighed a multitude of historical facts and exorcised her own prejudices.
But Einhorn's book isn't just about PolishJewish relations, It's mainly about her personal quest to investigate the facts about her mother's tale of being saved from the Nazi genocide, and she applies the same soulsearching honesty to that quest, and to her relationship with her mother and other family members.
Einhorn's ability as a writer to illuminate in great detail the complex mental processes she endured along her journeythe doubts, fears, frustrations, not only of the unfolding story in Poland but also of her hotandcold relationship with her dying motheris especially impressive.
Lovers of great literature will appreciate the beauty and fluidity of her prose, Unlike the blunt, clunky writing of some journaliststurnedauthor, this book flows like a stream through a fascinating landscape, Big ideas sprout from simple sentences, She has a flair for creating and maintaining intrigue, and is very
effective at bringing her readers along on her journey, rewarding them with subtle revelations and colorful details.
If you have preconceived ideas about the Poles or life in Poland this book will likely change them, If you enjoy emotionally charged stories about family relationships, particularly motherdaughter relationships, this book will move you to tears,
This book would be a great gift for a friend or family member who is either of Polish or Jewish descent, or for anyone who loves great writing.
It's also a great book for aspiring writers who can learn a lot from the author's masterful balance of language and clarity, I gave itstars. Ten would have been more appropriate,
Journalist Erin Einhorn has always been curious about her mother's story of survival in Poland during WW II as she was taken in by a Polish family after being smuggled out of the Krakow ghetto.
Her mother, on the other hand, was not much interested in discussing her past, other than to say she had been loved, both by her Polish foster mother, and then by the Swedish family she lived with temporarily before being reunited with her father and his new wife.
Erin sets out for Poland, determined to flush out the details, and finds an elderly man who tearfully remembers his "little sister" who disappeared one day and a complicated story of property rights with various generations of the family claiming that her grandfather had given the house to them in exchange for the life of his daughter.
With her mother suddenly dead of cancer, and only a few extant documents, Erin tries to do the right thing, feeling more and more browbeaten by inlaws and the younger generation.
What is the debt owed for a life that lead to her mother's survival and her life and her brother's How many thousands of dollars should she spend trying to untangle the postcommunist Polish bureaucracy that tried to destroy her family And what of the current celebration of pseudoJewish culture of young Poles No one comes out clean in this memoir, except for the family in Sweden who took care of her mother briefly.
An interesting read, full of interesting dilemmas, The author is much better at imagining what the past may have looked like than she is at explaining the present search for that past.
My hope is that now that she has finished her research, she will write a fiction story based on the facts she found, but with the details from her imagination.
That is the story I wish to return to,
The author's Mother was a toddler during WWII, and as a result remembered little of that time, Her grandparent's didn't provide much more that a rough outline of the past, So rather than being a detailed look at their family history, it is about the search to find that history, and the search was a convoluted and tedious one.
However, there are moments where the author daydreams about what might have been, She is brilliant at these times and they are too brief, Erin Einhorn's mother was saved during the Holocaust in Poland by a polish women who hid her for a few years while her father and mother went to the camps.
When the war was over her father came for her and they went to Sweden Where she lived with a Jewish family there for several years She eventually emigrated to USA with her father and new stepmother.
Her daughter Erin sets out to find some answers, First in Poland and then in Sweden, As always a story is much more than memory and Erin finds that social memory may not be the history Found this book on the table of the street sellers on Broadway.
I bought it and was struck with the author's path, Truth, fiction, family stories, myths, I loved her description fo ther isolation during her quest, and her conflict with coming to terms with the relatonship of the Poles and the Jews.
And as much as I wanted to know more, some information is truly unknowable,
Her book expressed love, conflict, beauty, friendship, family, mysteries, and the complexities of each, I can't wait to pass it on,
I hoped for more, This title was the hook for me and was not as expected, It possibly could have been a shorter book with less details and more focus on the aspects of the title, Very little historical information was provided about the family that hid the author's mother, That may have been a nice addition, Besides the basic property dispute very little was written about the house, What was daily life like And other questions were never addressed, This book is more about the author's discovery of her mother's childhood and how her own lack of family knowledge prevented her from really knowing her own mother.
The emotional relationship with her mother was the focus and she made a point to detail it almost too much, It was certainly a meaningful journey for the author and one she should be glad to have done,
This may not be a choice for you if you do not find Holocaust stories or mother daughter relationships interesting, Erin Einhorn's mother Irene born Irena Frydrych survived World War II as a Jewish child in hiding with a Polish family, Her father lived to be liberated from the concentration camps and claimed her after the war, and they eventually made their way to America via Sweden.
Irene always claimed to remember very little of her childhood, but Erin, who grew up to be a journalist, wanted to know more, so she began doing her own research.
Almost against her will, her mother becomes interested in what Erin is learning, and Erin decides to extend her research by journeying to Poland and Sweden, despite misgivings over Poland's history of antiSemitism.
After a few months, she plans to bring her mother back with her to share what she's learned,
Erin succeeds in locating the descendants of the family that "saved" her mother, still living in the same home which she is surprised to learn still belongs to her mother's family.
The family who sheltered Irene, the Skowrońskis, claim that Erin's grandfather offered them the house in exchange for keeping his daughter safe, but nothing official was ever done to give them possession, and Poland's years under Communist rule further complicated propertyownership issues.
Now that a Frydrych descendant has found them, the Skowrońskis want Erin's help with the house, and she finds that she needs to learn about even more distant relations as well as Polish property laws.
However, she no longer has her original motivation for the project just a few months into her year abroad, her mother dies of cancer, and Erin questions why she continues to do this.
Erin Einhorn's unconventional detective work and exploration of family history make The Pages in Between an intriguing story, although at times I found it slow going.
Einhorn is interested in putting a narrative together, and one of the things that fascinates her is what would motivate a Christian family in a country with a strongly antiSemitic tradition to protect a Jewish child from the Nazis it seems that the motivation was a house.
Meanwhile, she remains curious, and somewhat conflicted, about modern Poland's relationship with the Jewish people and while it does have some relevance to her story, I found that the sections where she dwelled on that disrupted the book for me.
The personal, family, and even property history interested me more, although sometimes the names got a little confusing,
Einhorn's writing is engaging, however, and despite the slow patches, much of the time the narrative flows along, The year in Poland is a frustrating and sometimes difficult one, I empathized with her struggles and enjoyed her successes with her, The Places in Between isn't a feelgood book, but it's a wellcrafted and at times fascinating one, .
The author travels to Poland in search of her mothers roots, To find out what happened when she was hidden as a child by a Polish family, Along the way she talks about how Poles feel about Jews today and how there is a variety of views but mostly positive feeling about the Jews.
Nevertheless, feelings of Jews who left Poland, and their families who know their stories, remain resentful, And this is fair in many cases, Most young adults in Poland did not grow up with Jews because they had been chased out or killed off, Their view, though positive, is frequently tinged with nostalgia for cultural diversity they've never experienced but imagine only the positive aspects of,
The author's story about her family and discovering that the way her mother described her childhood and how it actually was did not always match up.
It is interesting how sometimes unhappy children see their past very differently that others see it, I first heard Einhorn's story on NPR on This American Life,
Einhorn's mother was sheltered by a Polish family during the holocaust, In exchange for saving his infant daughter, Einhorn's grandfather bequeathed the family home, Sixty years later Einhorn travels to Poland to visit the family that took her mother into hiding and who still reside in the same home.
So begins the tangled web of Einhorn's journey into deciphering what actually happened, The story is complicated and full of bureaucracy,
Einhorn's mother is very uncooperative in detailing information for Erin, wanting to put that period of her life behind her, Even after thorough and painstaking research, the author unearths very little information and becomes mired in complexities without providing much substance to deliver a cohesive conclusion.
I found the authors examination of Polish and Jewish history and modern day relations interesting and educational,
This story was captivating as an NPR piece and would have also been a fascinating short story, but based on the actual facts that Einhorn was able to unveil, it made for a less than satisfying book.
In a unique, intensely moving memoir, Erin Einhorn finds the family in Poland who saved her mother from the holocaust, But instead of a joyful reunion, Erin unearths a dispute that forces her to navigate the increasingly bitter crossroads between memory and truth,
To a young newspaper reporter, it was the story of a lifetime: a Jewish infant born in the ghetto, saved from the Nazis by a Polish family, uprooted to Sweden after the war, repeatedly torn away from the people she knew as family all to take a transatlantic journey with a father she'd barely known toward a new life in the United States.
Who wouldn't want to tell that tale Growing up in suburban Detroit, Erin Einhorn pestered her mother to share details about the tumultuous, wartime childhood she'd experienced.
"I was always loved," was all her mother would say, over and over again, But, for Erin, that answer simply wasn't satisfactory, She boarded a plane to Poland with a singular mission: to uncover the truth of what happened to her mother and reunite the two families who once worked together to save a child.
But when Erin finds Wieslaw Skowronski, the elderly son of the woman who sheltered her mother, she discovers that her search will involve much more than just her mother's childhood.
Sixty years prior, at the end of World War II, Wieslaw Skowronski claimed that Erin's grandfather had offered the Skowronskis his family home in exchange for hiding his daughter.
But for both families, the details were murky, If the promise was real, fulfilling it would be arduous and expensive, To unravel the truth and resolve the decadesold land dispute, Erin must search through centuries of dusty records and maneuver an outdated, convoluted legal system.
As she tries to help the Skowronski family, Erin must also confront the heartwrenching circumstances of her family's tragic past while coping with unexpected events in her own life that will alter her mission completely.
Six decades after two families were brought together by history, Erin is forced to separate the facts from the glimmers of fiction handed down in the stories of her ancestors.
In this extraordinariy intimate memoir, journalist Erin Einhorn overcomes seemingly insurmountable barriers legal, financial, and emotional only to question her own motives and wonder how far she should go to right the wrongs of the past.
It's a subject near and dear to my heart, So on that level, I found the book extremely satisfying, I found this story of a woman's effort to find out the truth about her mother's tale of holocaust survival to be fairly engrossing, It showed how family events that one thinks are confined to the past can end up having real emotional, personal and legal ! consequences in the present day.
The author went looking for answers but only came away with more ambiguity and questions,
It was also interesting in that it showed how broad historical events can affect the lives of real people, and that these traumas don't only affect those who lived through them, but also touch the generations who come later.
In this way, it reminded me of sitelinkBeloved,
The genealogy aspect was also very interesting makes me want to do some research on my own family! A professional journalist, Einhorn exhibits remarkable objectivity in dealing with what has heretofore been a touchy, painful, and irritating subject to people on both sides of the equation.
See the many passionate, argumentative reviews on Amazon of "Maus" or "Fear: AntiSemitism in Poland After Auschwitz, "
Far from being an apologist for either side, Einhorn recounts valid examples of Polish antiSemitic incidents that led many Jews to condemn all Poles in perpetuity.
However, she reaches beyond the kneejerk reaction and indoctrinated posture of earlier generations of Jews, who taught their children to hate all Poles for the actions of some, or bought into those prejudices without any objective considerations of their own.
Even Newsweek magazine once ran an editorial describing Poles as "inherently" antiSemitic, inferring some freakish genetic predisposition to hate Jews,
Einhorn reaches back into the Middle Ages, reminding Jewish readers that it was a Polish king who opened the doors of his then mighty nation to the Jews, who were being slaughtered in every other European nation at the time.
This was the reason that so many Jews were living in Poland when the Nazi holocaust hit because they'd thrived in Poland for centuries, She also compares the situation of Poles during WWagainst other occupied European peoples, people who collaborated more freely with the Nazis, suffered much less than the Poles did under Nazi occupation, yet were given a pass by Jewish historians.
She covers all sides of the arguments as they played out in her head, applying her journalistic objectivity to her own subjective conscience as she weighed a multitude of historical facts and exorcised her own prejudices.
But Einhorn's book isn't just about PolishJewish relations, It's mainly about her personal quest to investigate the facts about her mother's tale of being saved from the Nazi genocide, and she applies the same soulsearching honesty to that quest, and to her relationship with her mother and other family members.
Einhorn's ability as a writer to illuminate in great detail the complex mental processes she endured along her journeythe doubts, fears, frustrations, not only of the unfolding story in Poland but also of her hotandcold relationship with her dying motheris especially impressive.
Lovers of great literature will appreciate the beauty and fluidity of her prose, Unlike the blunt, clunky writing of some journaliststurnedauthor, this book flows like a stream through a fascinating landscape, Big ideas sprout from simple sentences, She has a flair for creating and maintaining intrigue, and is very
effective at bringing her readers along on her journey, rewarding them with subtle revelations and colorful details.
If you have preconceived ideas about the Poles or life in Poland this book will likely change them, If you enjoy emotionally charged stories about family relationships, particularly motherdaughter relationships, this book will move you to tears,
This book would be a great gift for a friend or family member who is either of Polish or Jewish descent, or for anyone who loves great writing.
It's also a great book for aspiring writers who can learn a lot from the author's masterful balance of language and clarity, I gave itstars. Ten would have been more appropriate,
Journalist Erin Einhorn has always been curious about her mother's story of survival in Poland during WW II as she was taken in by a Polish family after being smuggled out of the Krakow ghetto.
Her mother, on the other hand, was not much interested in discussing her past, other than to say she had been loved, both by her Polish foster mother, and then by the Swedish family she lived with temporarily before being reunited with her father and his new wife.
Erin sets out for Poland, determined to flush out the details, and finds an elderly man who tearfully remembers his "little sister" who disappeared one day and a complicated story of property rights with various generations of the family claiming that her grandfather had given the house to them in exchange for the life of his daughter.
With her mother suddenly dead of cancer, and only a few extant documents, Erin tries to do the right thing, feeling more and more browbeaten by inlaws and the younger generation.
What is the debt owed for a life that lead to her mother's survival and her life and her brother's How many thousands of dollars should she spend trying to untangle the postcommunist Polish bureaucracy that tried to destroy her family And what of the current celebration of pseudoJewish culture of young Poles No one comes out clean in this memoir, except for the family in Sweden who took care of her mother briefly.
An interesting read, full of interesting dilemmas, The author is much better at imagining what the past may have looked like than she is at explaining the present search for that past.
My hope is that now that she has finished her research, she will write a fiction story based on the facts she found, but with the details from her imagination.
That is the story I wish to return to,
The author's Mother was a toddler during WWII, and as a result remembered little of that time, Her grandparent's didn't provide much more that a rough outline of the past, So rather than being a detailed look at their family history, it is about the search to find that history, and the search was a convoluted and tedious one.
However, there are moments where the author daydreams about what might have been, She is brilliant at these times and they are too brief, Erin Einhorn's mother was saved during the Holocaust in Poland by a polish women who hid her for a few years while her father and mother went to the camps.
When the war was over her father came for her and they went to Sweden Where she lived with a Jewish family there for several years She eventually emigrated to USA with her father and new stepmother.
Her daughter Erin sets out to find some answers, First in Poland and then in Sweden, As always a story is much more than memory and Erin finds that social memory may not be the history Found this book on the table of the street sellers on Broadway.
I bought it and was struck with the author's path, Truth, fiction, family stories, myths, I loved her description fo ther isolation during her quest, and her conflict with coming to terms with the relatonship of the Poles and the Jews.
And as much as I wanted to know more, some information is truly unknowable,
Her book expressed love, conflict, beauty, friendship, family, mysteries, and the complexities of each, I can't wait to pass it on,
I hoped for more, This title was the hook for me and was not as expected, It possibly could have been a shorter book with less details and more focus on the aspects of the title, Very little historical information was provided about the family that hid the author's mother, That may have been a nice addition, Besides the basic property dispute very little was written about the house, What was daily life like And other questions were never addressed, This book is more about the author's discovery of her mother's childhood and how her own lack of family knowledge prevented her from really knowing her own mother.
The emotional relationship with her mother was the focus and she made a point to detail it almost too much, It was certainly a meaningful journey for the author and one she should be glad to have done,
This may not be a choice for you if you do not find Holocaust stories or mother daughter relationships interesting, Erin Einhorn's mother Irene born Irena Frydrych survived World War II as a Jewish child in hiding with a Polish family, Her father lived to be liberated from the concentration camps and claimed her after the war, and they eventually made their way to America via Sweden.
Irene always claimed to remember very little of her childhood, but Erin, who grew up to be a journalist, wanted to know more, so she began doing her own research.
Almost against her will, her mother becomes interested in what Erin is learning, and Erin decides to extend her research by journeying to Poland and Sweden, despite misgivings over Poland's history of antiSemitism.
After a few months, she plans to bring her mother back with her to share what she's learned,
Erin succeeds in locating the descendants of the family that "saved" her mother, still living in the same home which she is surprised to learn still belongs to her mother's family.
The family who sheltered Irene, the Skowrońskis, claim that Erin's grandfather offered them the house in exchange for keeping his daughter safe, but nothing official was ever done to give them possession, and Poland's years under Communist rule further complicated propertyownership issues.
Now that a Frydrych descendant has found them, the Skowrońskis want Erin's help with the house, and she finds that she needs to learn about even more distant relations as well as Polish property laws.
However, she no longer has her original motivation for the project just a few months into her year abroad, her mother dies of cancer, and Erin questions why she continues to do this.
Erin Einhorn's unconventional detective work and exploration of family history make The Pages in Between an intriguing story, although at times I found it slow going.
Einhorn is interested in putting a narrative together, and one of the things that fascinates her is what would motivate a Christian family in a country with a strongly antiSemitic tradition to protect a Jewish child from the Nazis it seems that the motivation was a house.
Meanwhile, she remains curious, and somewhat conflicted, about modern Poland's relationship with the Jewish people and while it does have some relevance to her story, I found that the sections where she dwelled on that disrupted the book for me.
The personal, family, and even property history interested me more, although sometimes the names got a little confusing,
Einhorn's writing is engaging, however, and despite the slow patches, much of the time the narrative flows along, The year in Poland is a frustrating and sometimes difficult one, I empathized with her struggles and enjoyed her successes with her, The Places in Between isn't a feelgood book, but it's a wellcrafted and at times fascinating one, .