The Pages in Between: A Holocaust Legacy of Two Families, One Home

I could not put this book down! As a child of Holocaust survivors, I have been doing some research into my own family, and this book has inspired me to keep that research going. Erin certainly had the benefit of the conversations with her mother, and it was watching the facts of her mother's recollections be confirmed, adjusted, clarified or even completely change, that made the book constantly surprising to me. I believe that all stories of hidden children, and Holocaust survivors have twists and turns that would make a person scratch their heads, however, you just can't make this stuff up. I give this book my highest recommendation.

The Pages in Between is a journalistic memoir and Einhorn makes the most of this emerging and very elastic form of non-fiction. After a mother-daughter road trip in which she learns new details about her mother's early life as a "hidden child" during the Holocaust, Einhorn rents a room in Krakow with two young Poles, researches Polish-Jewish history as well as the history of her own family, then finds and interviews the descendants of the woman who hid her mother. The past she uncovers is far messier and more complicated than Einhorn imagined. There is real estate involved; promises allegedly made; the intricacies of Polish property law. Einhorn sometimes seems like a Henry James heroine caught in a web of sinister European intrigue but the twist is that she's at the dead end of a sometimes benign but often brutally violent history of Polish Jewry. No traveler can escape the ads for genocide tourism (Auschwitz-Birkenau! Klezmer in Kazimierz!) in Krakow. A major part of the local economy is based on Jews visiting the sites of extermination and/or trying to document their family histories, paying locals finding their way in the new capitalism. In what I imagine must have been a long hard struggle to shape this book, Einhorn chooses to include all these elements in a memoir jam-packed with reportage, interesting characters, unexpected humor in the midst of grief, and conflicting memories - individual and collective. The book provokes many more questions than it can explore, let alone answer. A great debut book.

Not only is this a moving memoir, but it's a suspenseful mystery at the same time. I read it cover to cover in 24 hours. This book motivated me to write down my own family history as a letter to my son. An unforgettable book.

this was a great story. It made me think about how unexciting my life is, and how I should get out there and investigate my family history. It was moving, and made me cry every chapter. I loved it!