The Seamstress Author: | Language: English | ISBN:
B006RNIM6I | Format: PDF
The Seamstress Description
Audie Award Winner, Biography and Memoir, 2013
Told with the same old-fashioned narrative power as the novels of Herman Wouk, The Seamstress is the true story of Seren (Sara) Tuvel Bernstein and her survival during wartime. This powerful eyewitness account of survival, told with power and grace, will stay with listeners for years to come.
- Audible Audio Edition
- Listening Length: 12 hours and 19 minutes
- Program Type: Audiobook
- Version: Unabridged
- Publisher: Tantor Audio
- Audible.com Release Date: December 30, 2011
- Language: English
- ASIN: B006RNIM6I
Seren Tuvel began her life as a carefree child growing up in a beautiful, peaceful part of Romania. Secure in her intelligence and in the love of her eight siblings and parents, the anti-Semitism that raged in Romania seemed nothing more than an annoyance to Seren and her family. After receiving a full scholarship to attend a prestigious gymnasium (high school) in Bucharest, Seren travels to her country's capital to city to quench her thirst for learning. This dream of gaining knowledge is abruptly ended, however, when Seren throws an inkwell in the face of one of her professors after he makes an anti-Jewish remark. She flees the school, begins work as a seamstress, and enjoys city life. Nazis invade Bucharest and the entire Romanian country; Seren feels that she can take care of herself. Yet soon this feeling of security fades and Seren decides that she must go back to her country home to escape the growing Jewish persecution in the city. Disaster meets her there as well when she and her father are rounded up in a horrifying night raid by the Nazis and sent to a federal prison, where they are falsely accused of being government spies. Seren is released from prison, yet as she receives word that her father is losing his mind, and realizes the destruction of Jewish life around her, she knows that her "journey" is far from over. Indeed, the pages of her story take us deep into the horrors of Auschwitz, and show us how somehow, Seren "rebuilt" her tortured life following the war.
In many ways, this Holocaust memoir is not extraordinary in its genre. However, in a few key ways, Seren's memoir is supremely effective and unforgettable. First, as I read "The Seamstress", I was amazed by the utter lack of bitterness in the book.
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.
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