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A Mother And Daughter Memoir
Harper
September 2009
On Sale: September 1, 2009
368 pages ISBN: 0061734764 EAN: 9780061734762 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Memoir
A miraculous lesson in courage and recovery, Bending
Toward the Sun tells the story of a unique family bond
forged in the wake of brutal terror. Weaving together the
voices of three generations of women, Leslie Gilbert-Lurie
and her mother, Rita Lurie, provide powerful—and inspiring—
evidence of the resilience of the human spirit, relevant
to every culture in every corner of the world. By turns
unimaginably devastating and incredibly uplifting, this
firsthand account of survival and psychological healing
offers a strong, poignant message of hope in our own
uncertain times. Rita Lurie was five years old when she was forced to flee
her home in Poland to hide from the Nazis. From the summer
of 1942 to mid-1944, she and fourteen members of her
family shared a nearly silent existence in a cramped, dark
attic, subsisting on scraps of raw food. Young Rita
watched helplessly as first her younger brother then her
mother died before her eyes. Motherless and stateless,
Rita and her surviving family spent the next five years
wandering throughout Europe, waiting for a country to
accept them. The tragedy of the Holocaust was only the
beginning of Rita's story. Decades later, Rita, now a mother herself, is the
matriarch of a close-knit family in California. Yet in
addition to love, Rita unknowingly passes to her children
feelings of fear, apprehension, and guilt. Her daughter
Leslie, an accomplished lawyer, media executive, and
philanthropist, began probing the traumatic events of her
mother's childhood to discover how Rita's pain has
affected not only Leslie's life and outlook but also her
own daughter, Mikaela's. A decade-long collaboration between mother and daughter,
Bending Toward the Sun reveals how deeply the Holocaust
remains in the hearts and minds of survivors, influencing
even the lives of their descendants. It also sheds light
on the generational reach of any trauma, beyond the
initial victim. Drawing on interviews with the other
survivors and with the Polish family who hid five-year-old
Rita, this book brings together the stories of three
generations of women—mother, daughter, and granddaughter—
to understand the legacy that unites, inspires, and haunts
them all.
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