Born Zsuzsika Rubin in Budapest in 1939, Susan Rubin Suleiman has recently completed a memoir titled Daughter of History. Julie Sugar writes in her review:
In the first of three parts of Daughter of History, titled simply “Budapest,” Suleiman is a discursive yet deft guide, moving Zsuzsika Rubin’s story forward while exploring her swirling memories along with Jewish Hungarian history; she is, after all, a “scholar of war and memory.”
Navigating past and present, scenes emerge in pieces: playing in the dirt, as a five-year-old, for weeks on a countryside farm with a Christian family until her mother was able to come for her; her family living, under false papers, at a noblewoman’s estate in Buda, where her parents worked as caretakers and Zsuzsika became Mary, learning in secret from her mother how to sing “O Holy Night” on Christmas; being liberated by Russians (who also jovially take her father’s gold watch from his wrist) and experiencing a brief respite, a time when “the Communist party crackdown was only a glimmer on the horizon.”
Read more on Jewish Review of Books: https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/jewish-history/16106/her-own-creation-and-pure-luck/