"To compensate a little for the treachery and weakness of my memory, so extreme that it has happened to me more than once to pick up again, as recent and unknown to me, books which I had read carefully a few years before . . . I have adopted the habit for some time now of adding at the end of each book . . . the time I finished reading it and the judgment I have derived of it as a whole, so that this may represent to me at least the sense and general idea I had conceived of the author in reading it." (Montaigne, Book II, Essay 10 (publ. 1580))
The Seamstress (Sara Tuvel Bernstein, published posthumously in 1997)
Holocaust memoir.
Unusual – this was a Romanian Jewish woman who lived through shortages and mistreatment in her home village and in Bucharest and Budapest (where she in fact worked as a seamstress) before being sent to labor camps and concentration camps and barely surviving.
The writing style is odd – structured as exact narratives and events over the years. The book probably was published only because Edgar Bronfman became interested. But in the end the style and the sincerity are the book’s strengths and it’s well worth reading. The Holocaust stories are just beyond belief.
Holocaust memoir.
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