A01=Dori Katz
antwerp
Author_Dori Katz
autobiographical
autobiography
belgium
biographical
biography
brussels
Category=DNC
Category=JBSR
Category=NHTZ1
Category=NHWR7
childhood
children
coming of age
concentration camps
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
europe
family
germany
growing up
historical
history
hitler
holocaust
immigrant
immigration
innocence
jewish
jews
judaism
life story
nazi
oppression
orphanage
peace
regime
survival
survivor
teen
teenager
true
war
wartime
wwii
young adult
Product details
- ISBN 9780226058627
- Weight: 369g
- Dimensions: 16 x 22mm
- Publication Date: 24 Sep 2013
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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Dori Katz is a Jewish Holocaust survivor who thought that her lost childhood years in Belgium were irrecoverable. But after a chance viewing of a documentary about hidden children in German-occupied Belgium, she realized that she might, in fact, be able to unearth those years. Looking for Strangers is the deeply honest record of her attempt to do so, a detective story that unfolds through one of the most horrifying periods in history in an attempt to understand one's place within it. In alternating chapters, Katz resurrects her multiple pasts, setting details from her mother's stories that have captivated her throughout her life alongside an account of her own return to Belgium forty years later-against her mother's urgings-in search of greater clarity. She reconnects her sharp but fragmented memories: being sent by her mother in 1942, at the age of three, to live with a Catholic family under a Christian identity; then being given up, inexplicably, to an orphanage in the years immediately following the war. Only after that, amid postwar confusion, was she able to reconnect with her mother.
Following this trail through Belgium to her past places of hiding, Katz eventually finds herself in San Francisco, speaking with a man who claimed to have known her father in Auschwitz - and thus known his end. Weighing many other stories from the people she meets along her way-all of whom seem to hold something back - she attempts to stitch thread after thread into a unified truth, to understand the countless motivations and circumstances that determined her remarkable life. A story at once about self-discovery, the transformation of memory, a fraught mother-daughter relationship, and the oppression of millions, Looking for Strangers is a book of both historical insight and imaginative grasp. It is a book in which the past, through its very mystery, becomes alive, immediate - of the most urgent importance.
Dori Katz is professor emeritus of modern languages and literature at Trinity College, Hartford, CT. She is the translator of several books from French and a poet. Her most recent collection of poems is Hiding in Other People's Houses.
