The Seamstress: A Memoir of Survival

This book explains how a simple idyllic life descends into chaos and craziness. I’m seeing some parallels with my country and it scares me.

This is the first book about the Shoah I've read that takes place in Romania (apart from the excerpt from Miriam Korber's diary in the anthology 'Salvaged Pages'). All of the other books and memoirs are from places like Poland, Hungary, Germany, France, Holland, anywhere but Romania, which also suffered mighty losses during the Shoah, though not always in the same way as in those other conquered nations. Seren was the third-last child of a huge family, composed of both full siblings and half-siblings, and despite having a strict father and living in a nation with rampant anti-Semitism, even among small children who were taught to hate, a land where Jews were not granted civil rights and civil liberties until 1923, and then only very reluctantly, she always stood apart from others. She was willing to fight back and to be her own person, to leave home at 13 to attend the gymnasium in Bucharest, to strike out on her own after throwing a bottle of ink at an anti-Semitic priest teacher and never going back to the gymnasium. Seren loved being a dressmaker, even designing gowns for members of Romania's Royal Family, though she didn't tell her family for some time what she was really doing and that she'd left gymnasium. Unlike many other Shoah memoirs, this begins when Seren is quite young and continues through her childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood. (She is also a bit older than the typical writers of such memoirs; she was 26 years old when she was forced into the labor brigade and the camps, not a teenager or even in her early twenties.) There were increasing incidents of anti-Semitism both at home and in surrounding nations, but things are still relatively "normal" a lot longer than in many other memoirs of this nature. Many start out normally but quickly move to the camps and ghettos; this book doesn't move to that territory for some time. Even after Seren sneaks her way over the new border through the mountain at the foot of her family's house shortly after Romania is carved up by Hungary and the Soviet Union, and she and her father are arrested and treated quite terribly, she still eventually manages to finally be released and go back to her family, whom she is ordered to move to another town. Her father is suffering in prison, but the family is largely still intact. It is while Seren is working in Budapest with her youngest sister Esther and two new friends of theirs that the town they left most of their remaining family in gets invaded by the Nazis along with the rest of Hungary, and but for the ones who have already escaped to the relative "safety" of Budapest or who are somewhere else, most of them are murdered. It is only in the Summer of 1944 that Seren, Esther, and their friends Lily and Ellen (the Helinka later referred to in the Epilogue?) are taken to a labor brigade; after several months of that they are transferred to the first of eventually three camps they would be in. They weren't taken to one of the death camps

Like others, I could not put this book down. Seren's story was captivating--she was incredibly strong in the face of horror. The fact that she was not German and explains what happened to the Jews in Eastern Europe gave me a perspective I have not had. And, like other reviewers, I found her lack of bitterness amazing. This was the first Holocaust book I've read which made me understand that people had no idea what happened to members of their families. I knew it before; this time I felt it.

This is the best book I have read about the halocaust. I could not put this book down. The hardships that the main character endured is more than I could ever imagine. The author told the story so vividly and there was never a dull moment in which the reader was bored or uninterested. I would highly recommend this book to everyone! I rate it as one of the best books I have had the pleasure to read.

My fathers family from Romanian perished in the Holocaust and I was curious about the history of the Romanian Jews which is why I chose this book. I read it in four days. Seren is the type of person you will never forget. It was her courage and the loyalty she had to her sister Esther and to Ellen and Lily that kept them alive. It is told in a very straight forward manner and Seren never glosses over the facts. I am aamzed that she was able to survive the camps and the trainride near the end of the book and that she continued to use that strength to get her past the war and to her married life and a mother to her children. I highly recommend this book, and not just to those of a Jewish heritage but to anyone because of the inspiration I found in this book. Seren Tuvel is a woman I would have been honored to know.

This was one of the most frightening and interesting books I have ever read. I stayed awake many nights after reading this book and contemplated what life must have been like for Seren. I think people of all ages should read her story and discuss it with family (especially children) and friends. We must all remember Seren's bravery and the tremendous tragedy of the Holocaust to prevent it from happening again in the future. I wish Seren were still alive. She would be on my list of top ten people to meet.