Watchmaker's Daughter (Taitz) - Book Reviews

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