The Seamstress

The Seamstress
by Edgar M. Bronfman, Louise Loots Thornton, Marlene bernst Samuels, Marlene Bernstein Samuels, Sara Tuvel Bernstein

The Seamstress
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Book Summary Information

Author: Edgar M. Bronfman, Louise Loots Thornton, Marlene bernst Samuels, Marlene Bernstein Samuels, Sara Tuvel Bernstein
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1999-05-01
ISBN: 0425166309
Number of pages: 384
Publisher: Berkley Trade

Book Reviews of The Seamstress

Book Review: Unique compelling account
Summary: 5 Stars

This is the first book about the Shoah I've read that takes place in Romania (apart from the excerpt from Miriam Korber's diary in the anthology 'Salvaged Pages'). All of the other books and memoirs are from places like Poland, Hungary, Germany, France, Holland, anywhere but Romania, which also suffered mighty losses during the Shoah, though not always in the same way as in those other conquered nations. Seren was the third-last child of a huge family, composed of both full siblings and half-siblings, and despite having a strict father and living in a nation with rampant anti-Semitism, even among small children who were taught to hate, a land where Jews were not granted civil rights and civil liberties until 1923, and then only very reluctantly, she always stood apart from others. She was willing to fight back and to be her own person, to leave home at 13 to attend the gymnasium in Bucharest, to strike out on her own after throwing a bottle of ink at an anti-Semitic priest teacher and never going back to the gymnasium. Seren loved being a dressmaker, even designing gowns for members of Romania's Royal Family, though she didn't tell her family for some time what she was really doing and that she'd left gymnasium.

Unlike many other Shoah memoirs, this begins when Seren is quite young and continues through her childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood. (She is also a bit older than the typical writers of such memoirs; she was 26 years old when she was forced into the labor brigade and the camps, not a teenager or even in her early twenties.) There were increasing incidents of anti-Semitism both at home and in surrounding nations, but things are still relatively "normal" a lot longer than in many other memoirs of this nature. Many start out normally but quickly move to the camps and ghettos; this book doesn't move to that territory for some time. Even after Seren sneaks her way over the new border through the mountain at the foot of her family's house shortly after Romania is carved up by Hungary and the Soviet Union, and she and her father are arrested and treated quite terribly, she still eventually manages to finally be released and go back to her family, whom she is ordered to move to another town. Her father is suffering in prison, but the family is largely still intact. It is while Seren is working in Budapest with her youngest sister Esther and two new friends of theirs that the town they left most of their remaining family in gets invaded by the Nazis along with the rest of Hungary, and but for the ones who have already escaped to the relative "safety" of Budapest or who are somewhere else, most of them are murdered. It is only in the Summer of 1944 that Seren, Esther, and their friends Lily and Ellen (the Helinka later referred to in the Epilogue?) are taken to a labor brigade; after several months of that they are transferred to the first of eventually three camps they would be in. They weren't taken to one of the death camps in Poland, but conditions were just as bad where they were; it's a marvel they managed to survive until the liberation in the Spring of 1945. I also liked how much time was spent to writing about what happened after the liberation; too many memoirs of this nature either have no sequels or only spend a few pages on relating what happened immediately after the liberation, wrapping things up without any real sense of resolution. A lot of people make the claim that many books about the Shoah start to seem all the same after awhile, only with different names, places, and specific incidents, but because of all of the rich detail, many different characters, timeframe, locations, the fact that the author was together with a sister and two friends instead of (as one tends to see more often) mainly surviving for another sibling and not friends, how much time goes by before things really start getting horrible, and the age of the author, this book truly provides a unique and gripping perspective.

Summary of The Seamstress

"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 anti-Semitism 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, Aand? managed to survive?she tells this story with style and power." --Kirkus Reviews

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