Magda's Daughter: A Hidden Child's Journey Home

In this heartbreaking memoir, Blaikie, an advocate and board member of the Hidden Child Foundation of the Anti-Defamation League, details her childhood years in hiding during the Holocaust and her painful struggles as a""perpetual refugee"" in the years following. She explains that she began her book not""as a memoir, but as a safety valve,"" and as her account unfolds, five decades' worth of despair and subjugation floods out of her. She tells of a lifetime of adapting to new countries, languages, schools, religions, names and even genders, beginning when, at two years old, Blaikie was smuggled from Paris to Budapest on a male cousin's passport in 1941, and ending with her continuing search for a sense of home in New York in 1991. Understandably, she proves more adept at conveying grief than joy (which she tends to gloss over when it occasionally surfaces), and while likened to Anne Frank, she lacks the latter's optimistic spirit. Although the book could have benefited from an editor's firmer hand--Blaikie belabors her point about searching for identity, and some cliches blight her otherwise devastatingly lucid, precise writing--she pays a loving tribute to the extended family who raised her and powerfully bears witness to a part of history that cannot be forgotten.