Review of Sonia Taitz's The Watchmaker's Daughter

When I posted some thoughts yesterday while reading The Watchmaker's Daughter by Sonia Taitz, I didn't think I'd be writing my review of the memoir the following day. The book wasn't a page turner in the traditional sense, but because I had connection after connection to Taitz's descriptions of her life experiences, it was a very quick read for me.

I gave the book 4-stars on Goodreads. I really enjoyed the book but I'd recommend it conditionally. If only I could think of the conditions! As I went to mark The Watchmaker's Daughter as finished and make note of my stars on Goodreads, one of the reviews caught my attention. Someone likened this memoir to another quite different memoir, Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt. Perhaps The Watchmaker's Daughter does have a wider appeal than I can imagine. I hesitate to read online reviews prior to writing my own review post here, but I do plan on going back to read through more of the reviews as soon as I've published this blog entry.

Here are excerpts of one of my favorite chapters in the book. The chapter is titled The Jewess at Last. Sonia is visiting the parents of her Christian Oxford boyfriend. She includes this conversation as she's reflecting on how it feels to be slighted as a Jew, a mere fraction of the slights (can you even describe being in a concentration camp as being a slight?) which were her parents' realities while living in Europe. She feels she now has something in common with her parents and that she can confront the nightmares their stories have instilled in her. Anyway, I digress.

Paul's father, Rikki (an old Boy Scout/Kipling nickname he favors), goads me now

 and then. He loves how angry and pointed I get about these little slights, how I get 

wound up like a desperate, talking doll. He is proud of being a white 

Anglo Saxon Protestant, better than anyone no matter what I say about his cultural myopia. 

Eventually, I come up with a parallel that nags at him. It's kind of an SAT analogy.

"England is to America as Judaism is to Christianity."

"So, you'd equate England and - and Judaism?"

"Yes," I say. "England is the root of the English speaking empire which, you would agree,

has popularized and cheapened its original quality. Look at American culture," I bait him.

"That's true. It's god-awful."

"So that's how you could see Judaism vis-a-vis  Christianity. One is small and old-fashioned

and riddled with rules and customs, and the other far more popular, with a simpler message

and more universal appeal." 

"Well," he says, "doesn't 'universal appeal' tell you something? There must be something to it if 

everyone  believes in it. That's why, despite the occasional whisper of doubt, I'm a Christian. -

sheer numbers can't be wrong."

"Well, according to your logic, McDonald's is better than a three-star Michelin restaurant. More

people eat at McDonald's."

"Oh, be quiet," he says grumpily... 

I don't want to bore you with all the connections I was able to make. They filled nearly 6 pages in a composition notebook. 

Some of the connections were completely personal. 

• Goofus and Gallant, those familiar characters from Highlights magazine
• A Rabbi Lichtiger (the same name as a rabbi from the yeshiva near my house growing up) reminding young Sonia that "God loves questions."
• Dressing up like Queen Esther, like nearly every other girl
• Judaism being so normal (and by my experience, much easier) in Israel

Some connected me to my Holocaust surviving former in-laws. And still others connected me to the immigrant existence that my husband and his parents lived after they left their homeland of Sicily to settle in the United States. Ironic how their experiences were so vastly different, but that I can list some of the stronger connections I picked up on together. Taken directly from the book:

• What did the phrase just a kid mean to someone like my father?
  He had never been just a kid.
• Immigrant parents who worry and sigh...

I'm sure many readers will recognize the coming to terms with who their parents were once they become adults and even more so once they become parents themselves.

Now I will wait patiently for my Books and Beer Club meeting, more than 3 weeks away. I just hope that my notes jog my memory enough so that I can bring up the points about the memoir that seem so important to me now.

Again, stay tuned...

The Elephant Whisperer

I'd heard great things about The Elephant Whisperer by Lawrence Anthony with Graham Spence. Really great things. But that doesn't always mean that I'm going to like a book. (I'm thinking back to Seabiscuit: An American Legend by Laura Hillenbrand. That non-fiction book about a horse got rave reviews and I couldn't finish it.) Plus this one was highly recommended for animal lovers - and I'm not an animal lover at all.

I loved The Elephant Whisperer. Whomever wrote the book (Lawrence Anthony or Graham Spence), the writing was fantastic. Additionally, I loved learning about African preserves, about safaris and about elephants. Many reviewers wondered about the title of the book. The Elephant Whisperer. Was Anthony saying that he was an elephant whisperer? Did have a special way of communicating with the wild elephant herd he saved from being killed? Or was Nana, the matriarch of the herd the true elephant whisperer? I tend to think the latter is the answer, that Nana was the one who had the special skill.

This is a memoir by Lawrence Anthony about his experience accepting a 'rogue' herd of elephants into the reserve he managed, Thula Thula. The matriarch was an escape artist, the teenage bull had witnessed his mother and baby sibling shot - and he had no male role model. The other elephants were traumatized and angry. Little did Anthony know that two of the elephants were pregnant. While Anthony worked at saving the herd from those who wished to kill them (both poachers and other conservationists) and from themselves, the elephants taught him life lessons about love, loyalty, and family.

The memoir was focused on the elephants primarily, Thula Thula secondly, and very little about Anthony and his wife, Francoise. The book was such a satisfying read and I wanted to learn more about the man. A quick Google search told me about Anthony's death and about how the herd, even without being "told" of his death, they somehow knew. And the traveled miles and miles to show respects for the man who saved them. 

This was a 5-star goodreads book for me. I thoroughly enjoyed the book and I wouldn't hesitate in recommending this book to anyone. I thank whomever recommended this to my community book club and I look forward to our discussion tomorrow.

The Lost Boy by Dave Pelzer

After completing The Child Called "It" by Dave Pelzer with so many questions, I immediately waitlisted myself for an e-copy of the second in his series, The Lost Boy. I was hoping I'd find the answers to my many questions.

Now that I've finished The Lost Boy, I have a few more questions. Since I suspect they won't be answered in the final book in this trilogy, I'll hold off requesting that one for awhile.

The Lost Boy gives a quick recap of Dave's life at home with his mother. And then picks up as he's being rescued and removed from his home and placed into the California foster care system.

I'm not sure if I didn't like the book because it didn't answer my questions or because at times I felt that Dave was too self-congratulatory. I did, however, appreciate reading about the good and the bad of Dave's experience as a foster child in California. I learned that at least during the time he was in foster care, his parents were both able to get in touch with him. Legally, however, he was not supposed to be getting in touch with his mother. That makes no sense since his mother was the one piling on the abuse.

Like the first book, this was a very quick read. And like the first book, it's going to take me some time to process all I've read.

Though I wasn't thrilled with the narrative, at the end of the book were acknowledgements, resources and then commentary from those that helped Dave on his journey from that of an abused child to a functioning, successful adult. I found these well-written, interesting and informative. As much as we often see that the foster care system is broken and we hear horrific stories of children in foster care being neglected - or foster children acting out and harming their foster parents, foster care can be a positive thing. It can be a very positive thing. It might not work perfectly, but often it can work. Things have changed so much from the time Dave was in foster care to the time when this second book was written to today. There have been advances in teacher training, in programs for foster families and the insight of social workers. It was nice to read some positive things since so often we only hear the bad stuff.

The fact remains that social workers are still overworked, it's often difficult to match the proper child to the appropriate foster home and many children still fall between the cracks. As I was reading, I could only imagine some of the discussion that we'd have in my community book club should we ever choose to discuss this book. We're a "Let's Try to Save the World" type of book club. We'd have our hands full with this book.

Would I recommend this book? I gave it three stars on Goodreads. I think I'd recommend it for a book club, but I'm not sure I'd recommend it for an individual to read without discussing. If any of you choose to read this book, I'll be happy to discuss it with you!

The Child Called "It" by Dave Pelzer

February is "biography month" for Books and Beer Club. We select each month's month at the previous month's meeting. If people don't come with several titles in mind, we pull out our phones and start throwing out names. One person suggested we read one of the Trump or Hillary books. Nope, we're not going political. Whew, that's a relief. What about a Jesse Owens book? After all, it's Black History Month. There are several books about the Florida woman who started Tupperware. Local interest as well as biography.

Another member and I had been browsing lists which proclaimed themselves to include the top (10, 100, 101...) biographies you need to read. She saw The Child Called "It" pop up on two of the lists. "Hey, here's a book I was supposed to read in college. And it's short." That's how our February book was selected. (I need to check old lists from my community book club. I think this might have been suggested there too awhile back.)
The book was short (less than 200 pages on my iPad with a reasonable font-size. It was also a quick read... but definitely not an easy book to read. It's autobiographical, covers Dave Pelzer from the ages of about 4 to 12, and it's written in a child's voice. Dave Pelzer's life as a victim of child abuse is one of the most extreme cases documented in the state of California. This book is a narrative of what took place and how young Dave struggled to survive.
Beyond the obvious question of how a mother can treat her son in such a horrific way, I was left with many more questions. How did Dave's father allow this to happen? Didn't he have any wish to protect Dave? I wanted to protect my kids every time their father hurled angry, belittling words their way. What about Dave's grandmother? Was she too afraid of her daughter to do anything to remove Dave from the dangerous situation he was living in?
Had times changed so much from the early 1970s to the late 1990s when I began my teacher training? We were given so much instruction on what to do in suspected cases of child abuse. I'm sure handling and reporting has evolved over that time. But we're teachers instructed back then to just look the other way? I didn't find it surprising that the substitute teacher was the first one to show Dave compassion.

While thought provoking, I'm not sure why this was a standalone book. I can see where it can be used as a case study for a college or graduate class. But for an non-academic reader, this leaves far too many of my questions unanswered. In fact, I've already got Book #2 in the series (there are 3 books in total) on hold at the library.