Who She Was: My Search for My Mother's Life Book

I absolutely detested this book after the introduction. I felt that the author (appropriately enough, the son writing his mother's biography), was a wangsty and annoying narrator, wrapped up in his own headspace.

Luckily for me, since this book was for the NextBook group I belong to and therefore required reading, the actual biography that follows this insipid introduction was fantastic. The author is a journalist who uses his extensive research skills to truly craft a narrative out of his mother's life- there is some conjecture, but the vast majority of the material is lifted from primary sources (letters, photos, etc) and from interviews with his mother's family, friends, and the apocryphal stories of their own children.

A few highlights for me were the initial ambivalence of the mother and her family towards WWII, until the atrocities against Jews were finally made known. The author's grandmother, essentially the evil mother character in the narrative, is from Bialystok and goes from endless hope to final despair, when she is unable to bring her favorite sister to the US from Poland and inevitably dies in the Holocaust. In addition to a quite different view of the Holocaust (from the perspective of a vaguely progressive and idealistic teen), we also see the beginnings of Burndy. My own father worked for Burndy in New Hampshire and occasionally in their home office in Connecticut, so I found those brief passages in the book a surprising peek into my own past.

In general, I did not expect to enjoy this book and slogged through the first fifty pages. At that point it went from laborious chore to fascinating read, and I highly recommend it! Admittedly, I was reading it from the perspective of a Jewish book group, but I would also suggest it for anyone interested in journalistic biography drawn from sources, as opposed to simple and embellished conjecture.