Anya

Since this book appeared in the 1970s, times have changed. People now hunger for the horrible personal details of life during the Holocaust, as if by learning they can somehow heal the hole in the heart of the world. In the 1970s, rare was the survivor willing to reopen fresh wounds, to expose their hidden pain--and few wanted to hear. But Anya Brodman, who died in 1996, relived her nightmare in hours and hours of interviews with Susan Fromberg Schaeffer. Although presented as a "novel," the story is largely Anya's--every gory detail, conversation and dream. Among the many horrors Anya witnessed was the murder of an 11-month-old child, Lutig Klatchko, whose death is depicted in the epilogue. (According to Schaeffer, Anya signed a non-disclosure agreement with her in exchange for a share of the royalties.) The book reads brilliantly and is hard to put down. "This is Anya's story," says a close friend who heard her story dozens of times 20 years before the novel's appearance. Every detail seems real, because most of it really happened. Anya's idyllic life in the Vilna school-turned-apartment building, in which Lutig's mother was her neighbor, her vacations in Zakopanie, marriage to Stajoe, life in Warsaw and return to Vilna, her imprisonment in the ghetto, the birth of her child, her incarceration, survival and eventual escape from Kaiserwald, near Riga. Anya was lucky. She saved herself and her daughter Ninka. Soon after that, her friends were shipped to a far worse prison, a death camp called Stuthoff, near Danzig. Most perished. Of Anya's friends, the relative handful who survived had no other family left. They lost parents, grandparents, spouses, children, cousins, everyone. Following the death of Lutig's mother last January, only one remains. --Alyssa A. Lappen

I thought it was such a pity that this book was out of print. It is hands down one of the best and most beautifully written books I have ever read. If you have read any of her other work, I've read a lot, this is maybe one of Schaeffer's best, and she is very gifted writer who writes with gorgeously poetic prose. Anya is a Russian jew who lives in Poland during World War 2. She is a newly wed with a dream about becoming a doctor, when Germany suddenly invades Poland. This book does a 180 and the gentle trivialities and worries of everday life are replaced by a new, cold harsh reality. You can almost believe that Anya is a real person. She is fallable and human, vulnerable and lovable. You can't help but admire her bravery throughout the story, and this story does not candy coat any part of the horrors these people had to face. Secondhand, and just as well fleshed out are the members of Anya's family, they live and breathe and make you care about them and you feel like you are looking back and remembering with Anya throughout the entire story. This book excellently conveys the warmth of Anya's mother, and her father's quiet, intellectual attitude. They remind me a lot of my Russian teachers. As a final note, I think this book is not only entertaining but it is a lesson about life and bravery and right and wrong. I found myself thinking about how lucky I was after I finished the story to live somewhere safe and free. This is definetly worth checking out, and I'm ecstatic that it will apparently be back in print again soon. Check here...

My mother first told me about this book when I was 9 years old; she'd been so moved by it, she told me almost the whole story, so I read it for myself, my first "grown up" novel. Over the years, I came back to it again and again, and always found something fresh in the re-reading. It's a beautiful and heartbreaking story, and the details are so fresh and vivid, I always felt like I was visiting the home of someone I loved and had missed very much. I only wonder why it hasn't become more of a classic...

Anya has the picture-perfect idyllic life of a well-to-do Jewish family in Poland. As she describes her home you can smell the smells, touch the polished wood and feel that you know her and her family. Her life is suddenly changed with the invasion of the Nazis and from then on you are taken on a journey with Anya (who by now you feel is one of your best friends) through the camps, the horror, the loss of her child, the growth of her courageous spirit and her survival. I wrote to the author and she returned my letter thanking me for my compliments on her book. A wonderful person and an exquisite author - Susan Fromberg Schaeffer. I recommend Susan's book to anyone who wants to see the Jewish Holocaust from the inside-out.

In a stunningly lyrical narrative, author Susan Fromberg Shaeffer has created an aching story of possession and loss, anguish and finally the healing of remembrance. With narrative woven as delicately as silk by the title character, Anya introduces the reader to her beloved family. As Jews in Poland, they have settled into a comfortable, happy life despite the segregation that hangs over their country. Beautiful, brilliant Anya enters medical school joyfully, and with equal joy shares life with with her family (who is, Anya's mother says, "too close, too close."). With perfect moments in her girlhood, and marriage to an adoring, ardent husband, Anya's life goes forth into another idyllic phase -- full of possibilities. When war crashes around her head with the bombing of Warsaw, life take a jagged turn into the unknown. With almost a capriousness, Nazis seize the fate of Anya, her family, and millions of other European Jews. The string of coincidence, luck, indifference, and tragedy turn this story into a kind of fable. In this book religion, superstition, goodness, evil and ignorance whisper secrets of potential life, and life denied. In the end, this remains a book not only to value for its perfect sadness, or even for the perplexity of the narrator herself as she examines her remarkable life, but also for the joy and poignancy in a life lived and kept alive through through a veil of remembrance and dreams. -- Iris Williamso