Elaine Kalman Naves – författare

Northeastern Hungary was full of places like the village of Vaja, where Jews had farmed for generations. Naves's ancestors had tilled Hungarian soil since the eighteenth century. They had married into similar farming families and maintained a lifestyle at once agricultural, orthodox, and Hungariophile. The Nyirség, a sandy, slightly undulating region wedged between the Great Hungarian Plain and the foothills of the Carpathians, was the centre of their world. But all this changed irrevocably with the holocaust; Naves's generation is the first in two centuries whose roots are severed from the soil that once nurtured them. Naves's quest for her past began with her father, one of the few members of a vast extended family to survive the Nazi death camps. His stories and memories of ancestors were a well-spring from which he drew strength, and they became an obsession for Naves as she was growing up and when she had children of her own. Journey to Vaja is her attempt to record the lives of these ancestors and reclaim their lives as part of her and her children's birthright. It incorporates myths and stories with family letters and detailed archival research to provide an extraordinary look at the landscape of memory and a testament to the redemptive power of love and family.

At the end of World War II, Shoshanna, a survivor of Auschwitz, made her way home to Hungary. Of all her family, only she and one sister survived the camps. Years before, her young officer husband had disappeared into Russia. Believing herself a widow, Shoshanna fell under the protection of an older man who, like her, had lost everything in the Holocaust. Having given birth to this man’s child before her beloved soldier returned, she made a choice that would cloud her life—and her daughter’s—ever after. Elaine Kalman Naves is the daughter whose earliest memories were shaped by the consequences of her mother’s decision as well as by haunting family tales. Shoshanna raised Elaine amid a wealth of family lore and all-too-vivid memories: the glamorous and eccentric aunts, handsome suitors and faithless husbands, death by order of the state, and murder at the hand of a lover. This is a lush and exotic family memoir set against momentous events, yet timeless in its truth-telling lessons.