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In the final section of this essay about her life as a child of survivors of the Holocaust, Anne Karpf exclaims: ‘I always felt that my life had been inflected around an event I'd never experienced’. Later, on a visit to Auschwitz, she recognizes an illusion: ‘as if coming in person to the site of terrible events which occurred fifty years ago could somehow yield them up for us to transform them - they might actually extrude through the stones and earth and be mitigated by modern sorrow’. The presence of the past has pervaded her life. Recognizing its separation from the present represents a culminating insight for the author, allowing her to accept that she can live with her ‘flawed and contingent accommodations’. The path to that insight is difficult for both the writer and the reader. The book's uncertainties, dissimulated in fluent and confident writing, created in this reviewer a sense of confusion which seemed to reflect the confusion of the original experience.
Anne Karpf's parents were Polish Jews. Her father was imprisoned by the Russians during the Nazi-Soviet partition, suffered great hardship, was released following Barbarossa, and spent the rest of the war behind Russian lines, anxious but relatively safe. Her mother, a virtuoso pianist, after terrible experiences in the ghetto of Tarnow was captured and, with her sister, survived successively Plash, Auschwitz, and Lichtewerden. Anne Karpf's parents met and married in Poland after the war, and eventually sought asylum in Britain, where both Anne and her elder sister were born. She records profound inner perplexity and self-division; of feeling engulfed by her parents' story and its implicit prescriptions; ‘umbilically’ attached to them, and responsible for their welfare; unable to enjoy emotional freedom, particularly to be angry with her parents, to be less than perfect for them. She began an affair with a non-Jewish man (which became eventually a settled relationship which has produced two daughters);