Sister in Sorrow: Life Histories of Female Holocaust Survivors from Hungary (review)

From the minute I started reading Ilana Rosen's Sister in Sorrow: Life Histories of Female Holocaust Survivors from Hungary, I sensed a kindred spirit—a child of Holocaust survivors like myself, who chose to pursue a doctoral study related to her family background.

The narrative of Sister in Sorrow starts with the origins of Ilana's name. Like many offspring of Shoah survivors, she is named after relatives who were murdered: her mother's aunt, and another "aunt" whom she would later learn was really her father's first wife. Rosen grew up with parents who barely spoke about their ordeals in Hungary during the German occupation. Her interest in knowing more was kindled during her doctoral studies in Jewish and comparative folklore at the Hebrew University. By then, it was too late to get more answers from her parents.

The personally significance of Rosen's research is transparent: The stories told by Jewish women who survived the Shoah in Hungary and are now living in Israel or Hungary are a direct link to her family history. She begins her journey of discovery by interviewing relatives, who provide her with other names—what sociologists call the "snowball" method.

Even though members of the second generation did not experience a direct loss, they mourn family members they never knew. Following the breakdown of psychological denial, they enter the confrontation stage of mourning, in which they seek information about the dead. For some individuals, learning details about the lives, before and during the Shoah, of family members who were murdered becomes a major mission. This search leads to feelings of grief, depression, helplessness, undoing, anger, rage and survivor guilt—emotions that need channeling, lest they become debilitating. In Rosen's case, the opportunity to turn her search into a doctoral dissertation, then a book in Hebrew and in English, was a productive final stage in her search for meaning. Some offspring of survivors are unaware that they are mourning, but Rosen was conscious of the process she was undergoing. She describes it as a "consoling and therapeutic element of 'talking with the dead' and coming to terms with death and bereavement on a personal level" (p. 3).

Sister in Sorrow, skillfully translated into English and edited by Sandy Bloom, is not only a major personal emotional undertaking. Rosen took upon herself an intellectually challenging enterprise, in analyzing her interviews from the perspective of diverse disciplines, literary-psychoanalytic and phenomenological-hermeneutic. The verbatim life histories of her respondents are presented at the back of the book, making it possible for the reader to get to know the women whose lives are dissected in bits and pieces in the text.

I chose to read the interviews first. I was sad. I cried. I laughed. I felt the humiliation of the survivors, the helplessness, the irrational guilt of survival, the numbness, the emptiness. I shivered as I read of the near-death experience of being herded into a barn and waiting for the Germans to set it on fire. I imagined the haunted feelings of the survivor who gave a child to a pregnant sister as they were facing a selection at Auschwitz. Being privy to the joyless, tortured post-Shoah life of some of the survivors left me heartbroken. But I was also inspired by the women's resilience. Despite their anguish, they married, gave birth, developed careers and built communities.

Rosen, a folklorist, ambitiously sets out to get to know her own mother and her namesakes posthumously, a personal journey that raises and answers questions of interest to others. Why did some Shoah survivors remain in Hungary after the liberation? From Rosen's small sample, we learn of those who stayed because of the slim possibility that a missing family member might return; or because of physical ailments that constrained their ability to emigrate; or because of dependent family members who could not leave. Years later...