The Net of Dreams: A Family's Search for a Rightful Place

This book begins in 1993, when the author travels to Poland and to her parents' hometown of Huszt, Hungary (now Khust, Ukraine), together with her mother and stepfather, to rediscover her family's past and how it has shaped them and continues to influence them. Originally just Ms. Salamon was going to go to Poland, where Steven Spielberg was filming 'Schindler's List,' but her mother insisted she come along too, and that her stepfather, who had been a partisan, would come too. During their visit to Auschwitz and Huszt, Ms. Salamon began discovering a lot of things about her parents' past that she hadn't known before, or hadn't known about in such detail. Her parents were from Carpathian Rus, a region that had changed hands numerous times between Hungary, Russia, Ukraine, and Czechoslovakia over the years. They had always thought of themselves as cultured Czechs and therefore superior to the shtetl Jews in places like Poland, Russia, and the Ukraine. The area they lived in, however, was eventually annexed to Hungary during the course of the war, and they found themselves suffering the same fate as Hungarian Jewry when the Nazis invaded in March of 1944 and herded them all into ghettoes. Ms. Salamon's mother Szimi (Lilly), twenty-one at the time of deportation, managed to survive through her friendship with two sisters and an amazing belief that this wasn't really so bad, that she was going to get through it and was never in any real danger in spite of what a deadly dangerous place she was in. Her father Sanyi (Alexander), who was significantly older than her mother (about thirteen and a half years), lost his first wife and child in one of the deportations, but survived first with the partisans and then in Dachau, due to his privileged position as a respected talented doctor. After the war they reconnected and began a new life together, together with their surviving friends and relatives, first in Prague, then in New York, where some of their relatives had been living for a long time, and finally in the small town of Seaman, Ohio. Through this journey through her family's past, Ms. Salamon discovered how a lot of these events had significantly shaped their lives as she grew up, without even realising it. And unlike some books about the Shoah, this one has a much longer timeframe; it covers their lives before, during, and after the war, not just shortly before the war, during the war, and for a short period afterwards. It takes the journey into 1971, when her father died. My only complaint about the book is that it does somewhat feel as though it ends in media res. Perhaps there could have been a few more chapters to give more of a feeling of closure, covering such things as how the family dealt with Dr. Salamon's death in the immediate aftermath, how her mother met her stepfather Arthur, and whatever happened to her maternal aunts who had immigrated to Israel before it was too late. But overall it provides a fascinating portrait of on

I have been searching for this book for several years and I have finally found it(I forgot the title so it's been a long search)!I read it years ago and was moved to tears many times. Ms. Salamon describes her mothers history in such a way that you feel like you were right there with her. You can feel her joy and her pain. You get to know her before the war touched her life and all the way through her move to America and the start of her family. This was the only book I have ever read that I could not put down! It's unbelievably good!

Julie Salamon is a friend and a person I respect mightily, so I am not exactly objective. Nevertheless, I found her discovery of her family's history--and her trip to the death camps with her mother--remarkable and so compelling that I was unable to put it down. I read the book in 1996 and though I buy, read and donate hundreds of books a year, this one remains in our library. It will be a good resource for our children as they learn of the effects of the Holocaust on us all--and of human ability to overcome horrors. Alyssa A. Lappen

This is the most moving story of Holocaust survivors that I have ever read. While it does a great job describing author's parents' experiences in concentration camps, what makes it unique is its ability to also show how victims of that horror were able to put their lives back together and not be defeated by it. I also was moved by the author's own journey of discovery about her parents and who they were, aside from their identity as Survivors. All of us, I think, would relish the opportunity to really know who their parents are