Shoshanna's Story: A Mother, a Daughter, and the Shadows of History

Susan Merskey is freelance writer in London, Ontario.

At the end of World War II, an Auschwitz survivor made her way home to
Hungary. Only she and one sister, from all her family, had survived the
camps, and her husband, an army officer, had disappeared into Russia
years earlier. Believing she was a widow, Shoshanna fell under the
protection of an older man who had also lost everything in the
Holocaust. She gave birth to his child just before her soldier-husband
returned, forcing her to make a choice that would forever cloud her life
and that of her daughter.

Elaine Kalman Naves was the daughter who grew up with the consequences
of that decision, first in Hungary before and during the 1956
revolution, then as a refugee in London, England, and finally in
Montreal. Her parents, ambivalent about their Jewishness in the face of
their earlier terrible losses, fashioned a new life designed to obscure
the old one.

Even so, Shoshanna raised Elaine with enormous amounts of family lore
and vivid memories of the past, among them a life of romantic and
assimilated privilege before the war, glamorous and eccentric aunts,
handsome suitors and faithless husbands, death by order of the state,
and murder at the hands of a lover. These stories proved to be both a
burden and a gift to Shoshanna and her daughter; although they initially
created resentment and division between them, they eventually led to
acceptance and reconciliation.

Naves’s award-winning biography of her father’s family, Journey to
Vaja, was published in 1996. This rich memoir of her mother’s family
is valuable addition to the literature of the Holocaust and its
consequences.