Obtain Immediately The Seamstress Penned By Sara Tuvel Bernstein Supplied As Hardbound

"NOT BUYING INTO THIS PARTICULARLY STORY!"
Narrated by Wanda McCaddon Audible, com

Would you recommend this book to a friend Why or why not

Not as a true story, This story is too contrived, Overall it's a good emotionally charged read, I just don't believe it as an actual account, I can't find anything about Sara Tuvel Bernstein except as it refers to this book,

What could the authors have done to make this a more enjoyable book for you

Just call it what it is FICTION! I don't doubt that Ms.
Bernstein suffered some oppression at the hands of the Nazi's, I just don't believe that she was the only survivor among millions to have the kind of resolve and luck that she claims in this book,

What does Wanda McCaddon bring to the story that you wouldnt experience if you just read the book

Wanda McCaddon is masterful as always.
Her narration brings layers into the story not otherwise experienced in print, Artists like her can make a book,

Was The Seamstress worth the listening time

Only if you think of it as either fiction or a historical account in which the author has taken considerable literary license.
The story IS moving and inspiring it's just not believable,

Any additional comments

I've read all of the reviews here on Goodreads, Audible, Amazon, com. Only one other reviewer feels like I do, I know I'm going to take a lot of flack for this, but I wish someone had given me a less emotional review of this book, I'm black and I'm used to Jewish friends claiming to "understand the pain of slavery", Well, no! "Your blues ain't like my blues"! But I always read books about Holocaust survivors out of respect for THEIR plight, However, there was something just not right about this account, Sara seemed to always have the answer or solution to some really horrific situations while her reaction to the deaths of her family members, one by one, was like "Ho hum!" I just didn't believe that one person in millions had the survivor instincts that this writer claimed to possess.
It's easy to say you've done this and that when there's no one to refute your assertions,

The story is wellwritten and well narrated, But when you "pull the seams apart", it just doesn't fit, There's no way to factcheck the claims of the author, Plus, she was only in that concentration camp for a few months right before the war ended, I found her account of her early life and the years leading up to her socalled "arrest" much more interesting, Living like a hunted animal with no country to call "home" had to be awful, It's when she gets to the camp and on the trains that the story falls apart, Who can go WEEKS without water while doing backbreaking work Or eight days without food or water packed into a boxcar like sardines One minute everyone is freezing to death inside the boxcar, then in the same week, the train is sweltering from the weather outside.
While the firstof the book tells an interesting account, the last becomes overly dramatic and predictable, And, again, I found Sara's total apathy towards the death of her family and camp friends bordering on sociopathic, Why Because nobody died like she claims,

Notice that Sara is the only person who repeatedly manages to "save the day" by stealing, smuggling, or hiding enough food for her companions, Under those severe and harrowing circumstances, I know I wouldn't take up with a bunch of losers who never bring anything to the table to help in the survival of the group.
When Sara is given a liceridden coat in the campwide clothing swap, she somehow gets one full of paper money hidden in the lining! And she just happened to have squirreled away a needle and thread in the tightly secured camp so she can rip up the lining to get the money, then sew it back up expertly.
Really As if all of those SS guards were too stupid to notice that the already thin garment just might be a little heavy or bulky! Then she and her friends used the money for TOILET PAPER for several weeks but, again, no one in the camp, prisoners included, noticed them "Benjamins" in the crapper! You haven't wiped your butt in months and that's all you could think to do with a large amount of money C'mon!

What I DO believe is that some opportunistic writers saw a KERNEL of a good book after meeting a Holocaust survivor, likely in her dotage.
I thought this book would be a firsthand account by an actual survivor who had gone through one horrific act after another during World War II as a Jew in occupied Europe.
It turned out to be a compilation of everything that could happen to several people in a "perfect storm" of terror and persecution, Kind of like "Forrest Gump Meets The Fuhrer"! There's something that just didn't pass the "smell test" for me, I almost didn't write a review because I knew others would be upset with my reaction to this book or they would say, being black, I just don't understand the plight of Jewish people.
That's absolutely not true. I sympathize and empathize with the hatred endured by Jews THROUGHOUT the history of the world, How could I not when my own ancestors were oppressed, murdered, beaten, lynched, and raped for centuries as recently as thest century Here, I'll just have to take the hit because I'm calling "a spade a spade" Sara is "shoveling" it a bit deep!
One of the best holocaust memoirs I have read, a story of true triumph! When Sara was finally rescued in the closing days of WWII, she weighed fortyfour pounds, "I felt myself being lifted up in two arms.
I opened my eyes. One of the American soldiers was carrying me, I closed my eyes again, Drops of water began splashing on my cheeks and running down my neck, . . I realized that the soldier carrying me was crying, his tears falling on my face, " She, and two of her companions, survived in camps whereout ofwomen died, through sheer will, "mental strength, emotional stamina," an incredible sense of humor and great hope, She survived "with her spirit intact, " I couldn't put it down, One of those intensely riveting personal accounts that is both heartrending and inspiring, powerful and vivid, It can be hard at times, but the way she relates her story and her personal experiences without pity, selfishness, hardness, or despair is amazing in itself, A testament to the human will to live through suffering, After I read a story such as this, I feel like I have learned lifelessons and I am a better person for it, Helps me to remember all the little things that are blessings in this life that I should be thankful for everyday, clean water, a comfortable place to sleep, overabundance of good food, just a warm and clean place for my children to live and most importantly that we as a family live together in peace without threat to our lives.
The Holocaust is one of the darkest moments of human history, if not the darkest moment, The Seamstress by Sarah Tuvel Bernstein is poignant comingofage memoir showcasing the indomitable human spirit, Sarah Tuvel Bernstein, herein referred to as Seren Tuvel, was a Romanian Jew, Much of Serens story is shaped around her large family she was one of nine, Her father was a lumber mill manager and was what we could consider lower middle class today, Her formal education ended at elementary school, yet she continued to learn as she became an apprenticed seamstress, Tuvels memoir opens with the story of her birth and closes with an epilogue by her daughter, Marlene Bernstein about Tuvels life in America and her subsequent death,
As with many Holocaust survivors, Seren Tuvel did not emerge from the Holocaust without emotional scars to bear, As Romania is an Eastern European country, and Serens family is Jewish, the Tuvel family has had to endure a long history of persecution, from pogroms to accusations of being “Christkillers.
” Seren, with blonde hair and blue eyes is able to achieve much success

through her sewing because many perceived her to be Gentile, Without her Gentile features, she would have been barred entry from the homes of those who were among the upper echelon of society,
InSeren and her father, Abram Tuvel were arrested by the Hungarian Government for being spies, their only true crime was being Jewish and living very near the RomanianHungarian border.
In the early World War II years, the RomanianHungarian border was elastic, which presented a problem for the Tuvels, Seren was eventually released her father never procured freedom and was ruthlessly shot for losing his mind during an air raid, Upon return, Seren and her remaining family are forced into ghettos, Seren sneaks out and continues to sew for Gentile households, She is then conscripted into a womens labor army with friends and family, The army brings Seren to a labor camp Ravensbruick, In Ravensbruick, Seren, her best friends and niece survive by sheer cunning, When liberation forces come too close to Ravensbruick, Seren and her group are brought to Auschwitz, Eventually they were liberated from Auschwitz, Seren stayed in a hospital for a few months because of her poor health, She went to a refugee center, taught a sewing class, and met her husband,
The Seamstress, gracefully showcases Seren Tuvels wide spectrum of emotions within its pages, Empathy for Tuvel naturally occurs while reading her story, Perhaps most surprising of all of Serens emotions was her bitterness towards the PolishJews within Auschwitz, She describes them as a ruthless, motley group with compassion only for their own, I had a hard time understanding why Seren felt such disdain for the PolishJews because with all the persecution and hate she suffered, why continue the cycle of hate, Perhaps the most recurrent emotion throughout The Seamstress was optimism, By retaining hope through the horrors heaped upon her, Seren emerged from the Holocaust physically and mentally intact, Many were not as lucky as Seren, as evidenced by the grief she describes from losing a vast amount of loved ones,
By learning about the Holocaust one may feel pity for the victims, but perhaps not empathy, “A single death is a tragedy a million is a statistic, ” Reading a Holocaust memoir puts a human face on the catastrophe, allowing for someone with no personal connection to the event to feel compassion for those who survived as well as those who did not.
As someone who has never experienced anything even close to what Seren endured, it is hard for me to understand the Holocaust, Through Tuvels words I learned of the plight of the Romanian Jew before and even directly after the Holocaust,
My eyes were opened to the existence of camps beyond Auschwitz, BergenBelson, and Chelmno, and that each of these camps destroyed the lives of millions real people with real lives and real families.
It was and still is hard to comprehend the amount of destruction Hitler and the Nazis wrought upon the Jews and the other “undesirables”, Even more shocking to me was how the Jews were treated directly afterwards, I had always believed that following the Holocaust, the Germans treated the Jews with kindness because they felt guilty about what had happened, such was not the case, Tuvel writes about postwar Germans feeling that because the Fuhrer was so adamant in destroying the European Jewry, there must have been some sort of logical reasoning behind it, However, it seems that so many years of ingrained antisemitism, it was probably a hard thing for the Europeans to let go of,
Seren wrote this memoir as a testament to the existence of her family as well as to tell her story in its entirety, The Seamstress is intended for young adults, There are graphic descriptions of the violence inflicted upon the Jews, including one section where Tuvel describes observing prominent Jewish men hung on meat hooks, Sexual violence is alluded to as well, The book is not suitable for a younger reader, The Seamstress isnt Pulitzer Prize quality, but it is not a book to be easily dismissed, This is an eloquently written memoir, a fluid read, The grace, dignity, and perseverance shown by Seren Tuvel during the Holocaust moved me, The Seamstress is perhaps best suited for a rainy or snowy day free of distraction where one may be transported to Seren Tuvels world,
"From its opening pages, in which she recounts her own premature birth, triggered by terrifying rumors of an incipient pogrom, Bernstein's tale is clearly not a typical memoir of the Holocaust.
She was born into a large family in rural Romania and grew up feisty and willing to fight back physically against antiSemitism from other schoolchildren, She defied her father's orders to turn down a scholarship that took her to Bucharest, and got herself expelled from that school when she responded to a priest/teacher's vicious diatribe against the Jews by hurling a bottle of ink at him.
After a series of incidents that ranged from dramatic escapes to a year in a forced labor detachment, Sara ended up in Ravensbruck, a women's concentration camp, and managed to survive.
She tells this story with style and power, " Kirkus s I thought this was a great Holocaust memoir and definitely worth reading, I think it is very important to never forget the Holocaust, though it is hard to "enjoy" these types of book, They are always disturbing, but I think that it is good for us to feel disturbed and remember, The Holocaust should never be swept under the rug because it is too unpleasant to think about, We need to feel uncomfortable about what happened, It was true, it was real, it was unbelievably horrific, Seren was a real survivor and she helped others survive along the way, I can't even imagine what I would have done in her situation, but I admire her greatly, I think this was a great book for adults and teenagers to better understand happened during the Holocaust, I have visited Dakau a different place, but I will never forget the cold sad feeling I felt there, I've read many Holocaust books The Hiding Place, Night, The Boy in Striped Pajamas come to mind, Even though each account was very different, I feel like these perspectives on such a terrible event in human history have taught me important lessons that I hope I never forget or don't want to learn.
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