First published 2016
Judy Batalion stands in her pristine apartment, white walls surrounding her like a fortress against memory. She has built this ordered life as an escape from her childhood home, where her mother accumulated endless mountains of tuna cans, magazines, cameras, and VHS tapes. The clutter suffocated every surface, buried under layers of dust and crumbs. But now Judy faces a new kind of chaos: raising her own daughter. As she struggles with the overwhelming task of motherhood, she begins examining the fractured relationships that shaped her family. Her investigation leads her back through generations of Jewish Polish women who survived the Holocaust and immigrated to build new lives. She discovers her grandmother Zelda, her mother, and her own daughter Zelda share deeper connections than she ever imagined. The very mother-daughter bond that once felt like her greatest wound slowly becomes the source of her healing.
Genres: family-life, historical-fiction, memoir, jewish
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: found-family, intergenerational
Setting: Poland
Period: 20th-century, 21st-century
1 pages · Audio CD · Recorded Books, Inc. and Blackstone Publishing
Content warnings: mental-illness