cover image Loves of Yulian: Mother and Me

Loves of Yulian: Mother and Me

Julian Padowicz. Academy Chicago, $17.95 (256p) ISBN 978-0-89733-616-1

This moving third installment of Padowicz's fictionalized memoir relays the plight of his mother and himself as they flee Nazi Poland to Hungary, then to Brazil, where they spend a year awaiting papers for emigration to the U.S. Julian's loves (his affection for his former nanny, his boyish crush on a family friend) form a counterpoint to his mother's lovers, relationships often perplexing to the young boy. Padowicz adopts a leisurely pace in the recreation of a child's pleasures and pains (the equator-crossing initiation, settling into a new school, his stuttering), while the Holocaust hovers, seen primarily through recurring references to his mother's writing (Flight to Freedom, published in 1942, was called "the first of the WWII escape stories") and to her dwindling jewelry, which she sold in order for them to eat and continue their journey. Having "pretended to be Catholic" under the Nazis, Padowicz writes of his growing identity as a Jew in Brazil, from an ugly encounter on the playground to an eye-opening meeting with the poet Julian Tuwim ("I hadn't thought that Jews could be poets"). Padowicz is forthright about "the liberty of reconstructing" the past; "Mother," he tells us, "was just as likely to make up a story as to tell the truth." What Padowicz makes of this is a touching account of how his mother used her remaining assets, which beside her jewelry, were her beauty and charm, to secure the safety that permitted him to grow. (Aug.)