Rosa's Child: The True Story of One Woman's Quest for a Lost Mother and a Vanished Past

Although this memoir, recounted somewhat awkwardly in the third person by author Josephs (Swastika Over Paris), has the Holocaust as its background, it is also a story of cruel sexual abuse perpetuated by a father on his adopted daughter. In 1939, through the efforts of their mother, an unwed German Jewish domestic worker, three-year-old twins Lotte and Susi Bechhofer were sent to Wales to live with Edward and Irene Mann, a childless Baptist minister and his wife. The adoptive parents gave the girls new names and attempted to erase their heritage. After years of suffering through a youth punctuated by her father's unwanted sexual attentions and her mother's pained awkwardness, Susi Bechhofer finally found refuge in a loving marriage. In the 1980s, with no assistance from the Manns, she began researching her background and, after several setbacks, discovered that her mother had died at Auschwitz and that her father had been a German soldier. Eventually she was able to make contact with both sides of her natural family. Bechhofer's story of lost family and lost innocence ends on a redemptive note but its impact on readers suffers both from its bifurcated nature and from stilted writing. (Nov.)