Search Results: Returned 3 Results, Displaying Titles 1 - 3
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By Pick, Alison2014., Adult, Doubleday Canada Call No: BIO Bio P594b Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: From the Man Booker-nominated author of the novel Far to Go comes an unflinching, moving and unforgettable memoir about family secrets and the rediscovered past. Alison Pick was born in the 1970s and raised in a supportive, loving family in Kitchener, Ontario. As far as Pick knew, both her parents were Christian. Then as a teenager, Alison made a discovery that instantly changed her understanding of her family. She learned that her Pick grandparents, who had escaped from the Czech Republic during WWII, were Jewish--and that most of this side of the family had died in concentration camps. In her early thirties, engaged to be married to her longtime boyfriend but struggling with a crippling depression, Alison slowly but doggedly began to research and uncover her Jewish heritage. Eventually she came to realize that her true path forward was to reclaim her history and indentity as a Jew. In this by times raw, by times sublime memoir, Alison recounts her struggle with the meaning of her faith, her journey to convert to Judaism, her battle with depression, and her path towards facing and accepting the past and embracing the future. Illuminated with heartbreaking insight into the very real lives of the dead, and hard-won hope for the lives of all those who carry on after. Alision Pick has published two volumes of poetry, and is a faculty member at the Humber School for Writers and the Banff Centre for the Arts. She lives in Toronto.
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By Eisen, Max2017., HarperCollins Publishers Ltd Call No: Bio E36b Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: In the tradition of Elie Wiesel's Night and Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz comes a bestselling new memoir by Canadian survivor Finalist for the 2017 RBC Taylor Prize More than 70 years after the Nazi camps were liberated by the Allies, a new Canadian Holocaust memoir details the rural Hungarian deportations to Auschwitz-Birkenau, back-breaking slave labour in Auschwitz I, the infamous "death march" in January 1945, the painful aftermath of liberation, a journey of physical and psychological healing. Tibor "Max" Eisen was born in Moldava, Czechoslovakia into an Orthodox Jewish family. He had an extended family of sixty members, and he lived in a family compound with his parents, his two younger brothers, his baby sister, his paternal grandparents and his uncle and aunt. In the spring of1944--five and a half years after his region had been annexed to Hungary and the morning after the family's yearly Passover Seder--gendarmes forcibly removed Eisen and his family from their home. They were brought to a brickyard and eventually loaded onto crowded cattle cars bound for Auschwitz-Birkenau. At fifteen years of age, Eisen survived the selection process and he was inducted into the camp as a slave labourer. One day, Eisen received a terrible blow from an SS guard. Severely injured, he was dumped at the hospital where a Polish political prisoner and physician, Tadeusz Orzeszko, operated on him. Despite his significant injury, Orzeszko saved Eisen from certain death in the gas chambers by giving him a job as a cleaner in the operating room. After his liberation and new trials in Communist Czechoslovakia, Eisen immigrated to Canada in 1949, where he has dedicated the last twenty-two years of his life to educating others about the Holocaust across Canada and around the world. The author will be donating a portion of his royalties from this book to institutions promoting tolerance and understanding.
