Bending Toward the Sun: A Mother and Daughter Memoir (review)

A doctor once asked Elie Wiesel, "How does one treat survivors of the Holocaust?" He replied, "Listen to them, listen very carefully. They have more to teach you, than you do them." My own experience confirms the wisdom of his advice. As a physician, psychotherapist, psychoanalyst, and director of the Project on Medicine and the Holocaust at the Elie Wiesel Center for Judaic Studies, I have learned more from survivors of the Holocaust and their families than they have learned from me. I was thus, eager to read a new Holocaust-based memoir dealing with intergenerational transmission of trauma, Bending Toward the Sun.

There are over one hundred non-fiction books and first person accounts focusing on child survivors (individuals who survived the war and were 16 years of age or younger at liberation) and children of survivors (children born after the Holocaust to Holocaust-survivor parents). But, there are as many stories as there are survivors. Bending Toward the Sun: A Mother Daughter Memoir is a story about mothers and daughters, and legacies of trauma and resilience. The first fifty pages tell the story of Rita Lurie, a child survivor. The second part of the book is the story of the author, Leslie Lurie, Rita's daughter. The third part is the author's description of her daughter, Mikeala, the third generation and Rita's granddaughter.

"Mommy, I was afraid that you died," is the opening line of the book, spoken by the author to her Holocaust-survivor mother when she was a child. In my review of this book, this line also serves as the theme of my psychoanalytic interpretation of the experience of three generations. From the outset the text focuses on enmeshment. Rita, who spent two years in hiding during the Holocaust, admonishes her daughter not to smile at strangers and never play outside after dark or be far away from her. Rita's loss, guilt, and anxiety leads to overprotection of her daughter Leslie. Leslie worries about passing on the same fears to her daughter Mikaela.

Rita Lurie was born in a "small town" in Poland in 1937. Her family experienced increasing anti-Semitic violence until the Germans invaded her village in 1942. Subsequently, an order was put out for all Jews to report to trains which would take them to their death. Rita and her family went into the forest to hide. Rita had difficulty understanding why they had to leave their house and why she could not attend school. At five years of age, Rita could not understand why this was solely a result of her being Jewish. Between the summers of 1942 and 1944, Rita and fourteen Polish Jewish family members lived in silence in the dark attic of a non-Jewish farmer, in exchange for jewelry and furs. Rita witnessed the Nazis shoot a cousin and uncle, and experienced the death of her mother and younger brother. (Years later, Rita wonders if her brother was smothered to keep him quiet so as not to put all the family at risk of being discovered and killed.) Being constricted in the attic leads family members to develop depression and to question God.

After liberation, Rita and her family spent five years wandering through Europe and living in displaced persons camps. They experienced ongoing anti-Semitism. Ultimately her father remarried in an Italian displaced persons camp. Rita suffers from tuberculosis and rickets. Finally, Rita and her parents emigrate to New York City to live with relatives. Rita experiences the start of school with fear, anxiety, and the inability to separate. The family later moves to Chicago and her father becomes increasingly depressed and unavailable to Rita. Rita develops psychosomatic complaints and experiences waves of sadness and uncontrollable crying. She sees a psychiatrist and through a year of therapy is able to start to admit and experience her anger and mourning. She begins to heal and see the light, and in her words, begins...