MOSAIC: A Chronicle of Five Generations

Armstrong's vivid, heartwarming family memoir begins with a shocking divorce. In 1890, in Krakow, her grandfather Daniel Baldinger asked for and received a divorce from his wife of 10 years, Reizel, because they had not yet had a child. (This was permissible under Jewish law.) Five years later, Baldinger's second wife gave birth to their first son, Avner. When her uncle Avner died in 1985, Armstrong decided to interview her five living aunts and uncles to piece together a "mosaic" of five generations of her family. Using novelistic techniques—both in the arrangement of her material as well as her liberal use of imaginative details—Armstrong offers a sprawling family history covering more then 100 years, several continents and scores of characters. Relying on the memories of her relatives (some of whom were in their 70s and 80s when she interviewed them), she displays strong dramatic instincts and can play a scene for all it's worth. Indeed, the book has a cinematic quality to it, particularly when it comes to her family's varied situations under the Third Reich: her immediate family posed as Catholics to escape the Nazis, but other relatives were not so lucky. Although Armstrong's tale is crammed with incident—the secret of her mother's abortion in 1938; a tale of relatives in Auschwitz who met Anne Frank and her sister in the concentration camp where she died; a Catholic priest who helped her family in hiding—the plot and her characters move along in a fast-paced, tightly woven narrative. Although readers looking for strictly documented history may find it wanting, Armstrong's story is likely to entertain and grip most readers. (Aug.)