What Time and Sadness Spared

Roma Nutkiewicz Ben-Atar is retired and living in Israel. Doron Ben-Atar is Professor of History at Fordham University. His most recent book is Trade Secrets: Intellectual Piracy and the Origins of American Industrial Power.

Not an ordinary memoir, this book is a joint project undertaken by a holocaust survivor and her historian son. Its reluctant primary author, Roma Ben-Atar, resisted until late in life the urging of her daughter and son to revisit her memories of her past. Finally only her granddaughter's refusal to accept the sanitized version of the family history that had been passed down to her persuaded Mrs. Ben-Atar to recall her Nazi-era experiences and literally to revisit the much-changed sites in which she grew up and was interned by the Nazis. Her son brings to the project an awareness, informed by a deep but unobtrusive immersion in psychoanalysis as well as by his training as an historian, of the tricks and difficulties presented by historical narrative and memory. He also presents the perspective of children of holocaust survivors (and, in a remarkable way, their children's children). The former understandably feel that their experiences and difficulties have no standing compared to their parents'. The latter can register the family past, from which they have seemingly been protected, in dramatic and unexpected ways.