Sara, Eva’s Daughter Kindle Edition

About this book

This book, the way it was written by Sara Székely, is an autobiography: childhood memories, family chronicle, history, persecution and war, mourning and a new beginning, love and marriage at an early age, motherhood, perseverance and lots of hard work. Its pages exude an impressive vitality, freshness, and fortitude. It is the legacy of her nativeland, assimilated along with the purity of the mountains and forests of Gheorgheni. The great merit of the author is that she has succeeded in recalling her childhood years, while at the same time offering a chronicle of the everyday life of the simple, hard-working, everyday life of one of the most traditional Jewish communities, that of the lumber mill workers, seen through the eyes of a clever little girl, attentive and receptive to everything that is going on around her. She observed and memorized everything, so that at the time of taking stock of her life, in retrospect, she could render it all in vivid, authentic colors, with a moving sincerity, so that it would become part of the collective memory, the legacy for future generations. We find the same veracity, precision and freshness in her account of life in the Jewish orphanage in Budapest during the Second World War, as in her return to Transilvania, a journey full of suspense and hope: will she find any survivors from her large family? But no: her mother, grandmother, relatives, neighbors - they had all perished... The strength to start life anew, the impossibility to forget the past and the hope that there must be a future - sincerity shines through in every line of Sara Szekely's book. How many books can we describe like this nowadays? Júlia Szilágyiwriter and literary critic(for the first edition in Hungarian, 2006) Read more