My Name Is Not Rifka

From the author

In 1974, I met a medical student, married, and stumbled upon a story when I discovered that my mother-in-law, Rifka, was a Schindler survivor. Delving into the story became an obsession, a fathomless horror that utterly consumed me.

But here’s the wrinkle: Rifka steadfastly refused to discuss her wartime experience, thwarting me at every turn. Eventually, twenty years into my marriage, she agreed to break her code of silence, bravely dived into the labyrinth of her past, and consented to my recording her testimony. At times, it was like the slow drip of a leaky faucet; at others, it was like a tsunami.

The biography is double-braided with dual timelines, weaving a tale of two head-strong women, each braid telling its own story. The contemporary thread spans thirty years, chronicling our turbulent relationship during the early years of my marriage and our transformational journey to forgiveness.

The second is historical and traces Rifka's tribulations from a sheltered childhood in a small shtetl in Poland to her multiple incarcerations in labor camps as a young teenager, including a salt mine and Oskar Schindler’s factory. It narrates the savagery of the Nazis through the eyes of an elderly Rifka in unflinching detail, casting back fifty years to when she was a child.

It's a haunting account of how Rifka repeatedly cheated death by an eyelash and my remarkable sojourn into the old-world Jewish wisdom she bequeathed during our intimate fireside chats—at times charmingly funny and plainspokenly wise.