In the King's Arms
Sonia Taitz, 2011
McWitty Press
230 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780975561867
Summary
Lily Taub is the brilliant, beautiful and headstrong American daughter of Holocaust survivors. Seeking relief from their traumatized world, Lily escapes to Oxford University, where she meets Julian Aiken—black sheep of an aristocratic English family.
When Lily is invited to the family’s ancestral home over Christmas vacation, her deepening romance with young Julian is crossed by a shocking accident that affects them all. Julian must face the harsh disapproval of his anti-Semitic family, who consider Lily a destructive force, not only in Julian’s life, but to their own sense of order.
In the King's Arms is a lyrical, literary novel about the healing possibility of love. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1950s
• Where—New York City, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Barnard College/Columbia University;
J.D., Yale University; M.Phil, Oxford University
• Awards—Lord Bullock Prize (at Oxford)
• Currently—lives in New York City, New York
Sonia Taitz is a graduate of Barnard College/Columbia University (Phi Beta Kappa; summa cum laude), Yale Law School, and Oxford University, where she was granted an M.Phil in English literature.
She has written extensively for the New York Times and New York Observer, where she held a column, and is also a columnist for Psychology Today and Huffington Post.
Her first book, Mothering Heights, was highlighted in O Magazine and featured in a PBS special on love; In The King's Arms, a novel published in 2011, was praised by the New York Times Book Review, ForeWord Reviews (which placed the author in the ranks of “the best poets, playwrights, and novelists), and Jewish Book World, the publication of the Jewish Book Council. In the King's Arms as also nominated for the Sami Rohr Prize.
Sonia Taitz’s new memoir, The Watchmaker's Daughter, depicts her life as the American child of European concentration camp survivors, and her efforts—through education, travel, and a controversial romance—to bridge past and future. The Watchmaker's Daughter has been praised by People magazine, Jerusalem Report, Vanity Fair, and Readers’ Digest, which placed it on the “Can’t Miss” list. The book has been nominated by the ALA for the Sophie Brody Medal, and listed by ForeWord Magazine as one of the year’s “Best Memoirs.” (From the author.)
Book Reviews
In this beguiling first novel, Taitz interweaves Lily's comical fish-out-of-water mating dance with her family's grim and discomfiting Holocaust chronicles. Improbably, the mix works.
Jan Stuart - New York Times Book Review
Mid-1970s London may be thirty years post-war, but New Yorker Lily Taub, who embarks for graduate studies at Oxford University, can't seem to neatly cover the territory between the Europe her Holocuast survivor parents remember&mdashand burned into her own consciousness&mdash and the bright, shining new world she longs to prove exists, and to inhabit....This novel is richly embroidered, each page a highly polished prose gem, rendered with a loving literary hand, a gift to readers, a mitzvah.
Lisa Romeo - ForeWord Reviews
Sonia Taitz weaves a witty, literate, and heartfelt story filled with engaging characters and relationships. The reader is moved by and invested in Lily’s realization of who she is, where she comes from, and her hopes for a more tolerant and healed world.
Renita Last - Jewish Book Council Review
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