cover image A Hidden Life: A Memoir of August 1969

A Hidden Life: A Memoir of August 1969

Johanna Reiss, . . Melville, $24.95 (217pp) ISBN 978-1-933633-55-8

Reiss and one of her sisters were hidden during WWII with a family of Dutch farmers, and at the urging of her husband, Jim, an American Jew, she returned to Holland with her daughters in the summer of 1969 to steep herself in the war she had survived. The trip resulted in her 1972 bestselling memoir, the Newbery Honor book The Upstairs Room . Jim, too, visited Holland and met the people who had sheltered his wife, only to return to New York before his wife and daughter, and commit suicide at the age of 37. As Reiss wrestles with the notion that life is ”one continuous good-bye,” where loved ones can just vanish, she weaves together memories of her uneasy postwar relationship with her saviors, uneducated, often slovenly peasants who repeatedly boasted about their heroics; of Jim's tortuous relationship with a mentally unbalanced mother who conceived him to save a failing marriage. This is a ruminative, plaintive cry by a Holocaust survivor who wonders if her own childhood anguish desensitized her to her spouse's suffering. (Mar.)