What I’m Reading: The Seamstress

I just finished up listening to The Seamstress by Sara Tuval Bernstein.  I was hunting for a book on my on line library with the hopes that I might find something good.  You can imagine why this one caught my eye, right?  It’s Holocaust literature…the title is “The Seamstress”.  It’s sewing related.  Of course I was going to read it.

The book was very good.  I expected there to be many references to sewing but there really aren’t a lot.  As with many Holocaust books, this book tells a lot about the war and atrocities during the war, then quickly sends the reader through a very fast life after liberation.  The story takes place mostly in Romania.  Of the Holocaust books I’ve read, few have been Romanian based.

Here’s what Amazon had to say:“From its opening pages, in which she recounts her own premature birth, triggered by terrifying rumors of an incipient pogrom, Bernstein‘ s tale is clearly not a typical memoir of the Holocaust. She was born into a large family in rural Romania and grew up feisty and willing to fight back physically against anti-Semitism from other schoolchildren. She defied her father’ s orders to turn down a scholarship that took her to Bucharest, and got herself expelled from that school when she responded to a priest/teacher’ s vicious diatribe against the Jews by hurling a bottle of ink at him?After a series of incidents that ranged from dramatic escapes to a year in a forced labor detachment, Sara ended up in Ravensbruck, a women’ s concentration camp, Aand? managed to survive?she tells this story with style and power.”

Amazon readers give the book 4.6 stars.  I admire the story and recommend it.  I’d give it 4.4 stars.