The Watchmaker's Daughter: A Memoir
Sonia Taitz, 2012
McWitty Press
256 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780975561881
Summary
The Watchmaker's Daughter tells the story of a child of two refugees: a watchmaker who saved lives within Dachau prison, and his wife, a gifted concert pianist about to make her debut when the Nazis seized power.
In this memoir, Sonia Taitz is born into a world in which the Holocaust is discussed constantly by her insular concentration camp-surviving parents. This legacy, combined with Sonia's passion and intelligence, leads the author to forge an adventurous life in which she seeks to heal both her parents and herself through travel, achievement, and a daring love affair. Ironically, it is her marriage to a non-Jew that brings her parents the peace and fulfillment they would never have imagined possible.
Sonia manages to combine her own independence with a tender dutifulness, honoring her parents' legacy while forging a new family of her own. (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
• 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
A heartbreaking memoir of healing power and redeeming devotion, Sonia Taitz's The Watchmaker's Daughter has the dovish beauty and levitating spirit of a psalm. The suffering and endurance of Taitz' parents—Holocaust "death camp graduates" who met at the Lithuanian Jewish Survivor's Ball in a New York hotel (imagine Steven Spielberg photographing that dance floor tableau)—form the shadow-hung backdrop of a childhood in a high-octance, postwar America where history seems weightless and tragedy a foreign import—a Hollywood paradise of perky blondes, Pepsodent smiles, and innocent high-school hijinks where our author and heroine longs to fit in. Although the wonder years that Taitz scrupulously, tenderly, beautifully, often comically renders aren't that far removed from us, they and the Washington Heights she grew up in, the shop where her father repaired watches like a physician tending to the sick tick of life itself, the grand movie houses where the image of Doris Day sunshined the giant screen, have acquired the ache and poignance of a lost, Kodachrome age. A past is here reborn and tenderly restored with the love and absorption of a daughter with a final duty to perform, a last act of fidelity.
James Wolcott: New Yorker and Vanity Fair cultural critic, author of Lucking Out
Not your typical coming-of-age story....American Sonia Taitz, born to survivors of the Holocaust, lives under its long shadow in The Watchmaker's Daughter.
Elissa Schappell - Vanity Fair
Funny and heartwrenching.
People
Taitz writes beautifully about religious roots, generational culture clashes, and a family's abiding love.
Reader's Digest
Even now, as the last Holocaust survivors pass away, wrenching reverberations run through Taitz's poignant, poetic memoir
Booklist
An invigorating memoir about coming of age as the daughter of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants and Holocaust survivors. Taitz's (In the King's Arms, 2011, etc.) childhood was punctuated by stories of her parents' and grandmother's loss as well as their faith during their time in the ghetto and Dachau.... Though the author focuses mostly on her [own] experiences, it is Simon and Gita's perseverance that truly shines—the former a respected watchmaker who began life anew more than once, the latter a concert-level pianist whose dreams were thwarted by war and who rescued her own mother from the Nazis' infamous selections. Taitz portrays her parents with tenderness while acknowledging their imperfections. An affecting, brisk read, especially noteworthy for its essential optimism and accomplished turns of phrase.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Sonia Taitz describes being born into a “binocular” world (her parents emerged from a war-torn European past, but she is born into modern, hopeful America). How does this contrast affect her?
2. Do all parents live in different worlds than that of their children—simply because they grow up in different generations? How is your reality different than that of your parents or your children?
3. In our modern lives, children often travel away from their parents. But Sonia’s father asks her to stay home for college. Are separations more difficult for parents who are immigrants?
4. To what extent does the author keep her “Vow” to her father as she leaves law school to travel to England and Oxford University?
5. The author says her parents were not victims, but heroes. How does this idea of “heroism” propel her into the adventures of the book—achievement, travel, romance?
6. How much do we owe our parents in terms of preserving their culture and traditions? How much do our children owe us?
7. This memoir features star-crossed lovers. Should the choice of a marriage partner be affected by one’s family culture, or is this a dated (or even discriminatory) view?
8. Sonia’s father is very ambitious about his precocious child. The women’s movement also propels the author to “succeed” in worldly terms. What lessons does the author learn from her mother as time goes by?
9. The final line of the book is: “I was not just the watchmaker’s daughter. I was hers.” What is the author saying with these words?
10. Did the book leave you sad, happy, or a bit of both—and why?
(Questions courtesy of the author.)
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