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Summary: Heart-wrenching!
Review: About a month ago I was down to having only one book left to read. So I surfed on over to Amazon.com and bought 12 books (6 fiction and 6 non-fiction). While there I noticed a novel that I always wanted to read since the 70's, but had forgot all about it over the years. The novel is called "Anya" by Susan Fromberg Schaefer. It was a great read. The story is about a Russian Jewish family that moved to Poland a few years before the 2nd-world war. How magnificent their life was and how caring each member of the family was to each other and their relatives. Then came the Nazi's and imprisonment, and for most death. Anya and her child survive, and they are the only survivors from her family. Anya had to search for her daughter after the war and finally found her. But the striking thing about the novel is the 'based on fact' atrocities performed by the Nazi's. Anya's heroic struggle just to survive and the strong determination she had to search and find her daughter, who was snatched-up by one of the Nazi officer's to become his and his wife's child. The book really affected me deeply and was heart-wrenching, but of course, if you did not have to live through the holocaust yourself, you can never really feel what it was truly like, but author Susan Fromberg Schaeffer does create a reality, because of her knowledge of the subject, that allows you to feel the tragedy that was the holocaust as much as any novel will allow.
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Summary: Unforgettable
Review: Anya was a really unforgettable character. I really think this is the best book Susan Fromberg Schaffer has written. This book deals with simple survival against overwhelming odds, and all through it Anya is incredibly brave and strong and theres a sense of hope and destiny in it. It made me think about how lucky I really am and how much worse things could be. It takes place during the holocaust. The most intense parts were when Anya left the first labor camp and went on the train to Auchswitchz and came to Auchswitz itself. Anyway, it was a wonderful book.
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Summary: Best I have ever read, touched my life forever.
Review: I read this book when I was in high school, the details of the home from which Anya comes from are still embedded in my mind, I can still remember the style of the furniture, I can remember the breakfast of oatmeal which Anya ate on her journey.
I envy her lifestyle and yet I felt heart broken in the events that came.I highly recommend this book.
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Summary: Like listening to your Grandmother
Review: I read this book years ago when it was first published and I can still "see" many passages from the book. After I had finished the book, I felt as if my Grandmother or another close relative had told me her life story. I feel that anyone who is interested in learning more about life in Europe before and during the Holocaust should read this book. "Anya" has stayed with me for over twenty years. Susan E. Huggins
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Summary: My first novel
Review: I read this book years ago when it was first published and I can still "see" many passages from the book. After I had finished the book, I felt as if my Grandmother or another close relative had told me her life story. I feel that anyone who is interested in learning more about life in Europe before and during the Holocaust should read this book. "Anya" has stayed with me for over twenty years. Susan E. Huggins
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Summary: Awesome, it looks like they are going to reprint this book
Review: I thought it was such a pity that this book was out of print. It is hands down one of the best and most beautifully written books I have ever read. If you have read any of her other work, I've read a lot, this is maybe one of Schaeffer's best, and she is very gifted writer who writes with gorgeously poetic prose.
Anya is a Russian jew who lives in Poland during World War 2. She is a newly wed with a dream about becoming a doctor, when Germany suddenly invades Poland. This book does a 180 and the gentle trivialities and worries of everday life are replaced by a new, cold harsh reality.
You can almost believe that Anya is a real person. She is fallable and human, vulnerable and lovable. You can't help but admire her bravery throughout the story, and this story does not candy coat any part of the horrors these people had to face. Secondhand, and just as well fleshed out are the members of Anya's family, they live and breathe and make you care about them and you feel like you are looking back and remembering with Anya throughout the entire story. This book excellently conveys the warmth of Anya's mother, and her father's quiet, intellectual attitude. They remind me a lot of my Russian teachers.
As a final note, I think this book is not only entertaining but it is a lesson about life and bravery and right and wrong. I found myself thinking about how lucky I was after I finished the story to live somewhere safe and free. This is definetly worth checking out, and I'm ecstatic that it will apparently be back in print again soon. Check here...
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Summary: Anya by Susan Fromberg Schaeffer
Review: I was first introduced to this novel when I was in eighth grade. My librarian at the time pointed it out to me because she knew I was interested in books dealing with the Holocaust. I read the library's copy of Anya so many times that the book began to fall apart. I later got a copy of my own that too fell apart. Susan Fromberg Schaeffer does a phenomenal job of describing what Anya's life is like and how she lives. The book makes you laugh and makes you cry. Each time you read it you come away with the feeling that you have been there with Anya through all her trials and tribulations.
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Summary: Anya by Susan Fromberg Schaeffer
Review: I was first introduced to this novel when I was in eighth grade. My librarian at the time pointed it out to me because she knew I was interested in books dealing with the Holocaust. I read the library's copy of Anya so many times that the book began to fall apart. I later got a copy of my own that too fell apart. Susan Fromberg Schaeffer does a phenomenal job of describing what Anya's life is like and how she lives. The book makes you laugh and makes you cry. Each time you read it you come away with the feeling that you have been there with Anya through all her trials and tribulations.
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Summary: Art imitates life
Review: Since this book appeared in the 1970s, times have changed. People now hunger for the horrible personal details of life during the Holocaust, as if by learning they can somehow heal the hole in the heart of the world. In the 1970s, rare was the survivor willing to reopen fresh wounds, to expose their hidden pain--and few wanted to hear.
But Anya Brodman, who died in 1996, relived her nightmare in hours and hours of interviews with Susan Fromberg Schaeffer. Although presented as a "novel," the story is largely Anya's--every gory detail, conversation and dream.
Among the many horrors Anya witnessed was the murder of an 11-month-old child, Lutig Klatchko, whose death is depicted in the epilogue. (According to Schaeffer, Anya signed a non-disclosure agreement with her in exchange for a share of the royalties.)
The book reads brilliantly and is hard to put down. "This is Anya's story," says a close friend who heard her story dozens of times 20 years before the novel's appearance. Every detail seems real, because most of it really happened.
Anya's idyllic life in the Vilna school-turned-apartment building, in which Lutig's mother was her neighbor, her vacations in Zakopanie, marriage to Stajoe, life in Warsaw and return to Vilna, her imprisonment in the ghetto, the birth of her child, her incarceration, survival and eventual escape from Kaiserwald, near Riga.
Anya was lucky. She saved herself and her daughter Ninka. Soon after that, her friends were shipped to a far worse prison, a death camp called Stuthoff, near Danzig. Most perished.
Of Anya's friends, the relative handful who survived had no other family left. They lost parents, grandparents, spouses, children, cousins, everyone. Following the death of Lutig's mother last January, only one remains.
--Alyssa A. Lappen
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