Seed of Sarah:
Jordan, Patrick
IN BRIEF SEED OF SARAH: MEMOIRS OF A SURVIVOR, by Judith Magyar Isaacson, University of Illinois Press, $18.95,171 pp. This story is almost too good to be true: the nearly miraculous deliverance...
...It is a story compellingly told, carefully researched-with maps and telling family photographs, rescued from a secret hiding place-and written in an accomplished English that never falters...
...P.J.cle...
...This is a mystery, the mystery of deliverance...
...All Jewish children, young mothers, and old people almost from whole Europe...
...How then to live to tell this story so beautifully, to do it without the marks of anguish or of chains (in a mix-up, she was even spared being tattooed at Auschwitz...
...the resilience of women, who as a group bond and protect one another in a manner more naturally efficient and successful than men...
...Because there is no answer as to why this Judith Magyar Isaacson escaped...
...P.J...
...There is, in fact, a lilt about the whole enterprise, both in content and exposition, that must make it singular in Holocaust literature...
...And this one-despite its beauty, its relatively happy ending (she, her mother, and an aunt are freed in Germany by the Americans, she marries one of her dashing deliverers, they have a family in Maine, and the author becomes dean of students at Bates College), its almost Americanized nonchalance-leaves you trembling in a very particular sense...
...There are insights...
...This story is almost too good to be true: the nearly miraculous deliverance from the Nazi furnaces of a stunningly beautiful, refined, middle-class Hungarian Jew-nineteen when she was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau with her family- with scarcely a hair of her head being singed, her mind and body still whole at deliverance...
...and even the love of poetry and music that could lead Isaacson to whistle Mozart while forced to fill artillery shells in a Nazi munitions factory...
...The incredible smile of fate on more numerous occasions than is statistically plausible...
...Again, writing her yet-to-be-met father-in-law: "I am always afraid to realize that all, all of them are dead...
...No final resort to faith ("We used to be scolded by our rabbi for being 'Yom Kippur Jews'-just as we are in Auburn, Maine, today...
...It is worthy of the prophet Daniel and resonant with his canticle...
...Yet you cannot come away from Isaacson's tale without once again sensing not only the utter heinousness of the Holocaust, but the uniqueness of every story associated with it...
...The whole thing was so terrible that in some strange way it was more amusing than I could expect...
...As the author wrote her American father-in-law in heavily Hungarianized English in late 1945: "Still I cannot tell you, that I was very unhappy in the lagers [camps...
...Insights, but no answer...
Vol. 117 • September 1990 • No. 15
