For Mother's Day

First, I want to wish all the moms a very happy Mother's Day. I hope your day is filled with lots of love and laughter and special times with your families.

 There's no denying the bond we have with our mothers, no matter what the relationship has been like. I wrote about that in my blog for Venture Galleries that posted the other day, and my blogger friend, Susan Fleet Swiderski had a nice post about mothers on her blog, I Think, Therefore I Yam. And no matter what the relationship has been, we do owe them for our lives, even if they have disappointed us in many other ways.

That is one of the things that the author of The Woman in the Photograph comes to understand. This is a memoir from Mani Feniger, relating her quest to find out more about her mother, a German Jew who left Germany just before the Jews were rounded up and sent to death camps during the Holocaust. Mani finds a photograph of her mother taken years ago that shows a happy, carefree young woman who appears so different from the aloof, cynical mother Mani grew up with.

As Mani researches her mother's life from her beginnings in Leipzig, Germany to her life in New York, she comes to understand the hardships that molded her mother and so many other German Jews who left their home country, as well as most of their treasures.

This was an interesting story and offered a glimpse of a part of that history that many of us were not as aware of as we are the victims of the concentration camps. The story also points out the importance of looking at the issues in our relationships with a different perspective and perhaps finding some peace.

The book is written in the narrative nonfiction style that makes a memoir read like a novel and can pull one into the story. Most of the time that worked quite well, but there were a few places where the imagined scenes between her mother and others went on a bit too long and included details that just seemed to bog the story down.

Some time ago, the author offered the ebook free for Kindle and I got my copy then. Now it is priced at $8.99, which I think is too high for an ebook, but if you don't think so, you might give it a try.

 

As a special Mother's Day treat, I am offering my historical mystery, Boxes For Beds free today. The
story is set in Arkansas in 1961 when the mob still ruled Hot Springs, and a young woman who has left New York to find some peace in the quiet little town of Pine Hollow gets caught up in kidnappings and murder.

I was just reading the Sunday comics and laughed out loud when I read Mallard Fillmore. The picture is a gray-haired lady in a comfy plush chair reading a card that says, Dear Mom, Thanks for loving me, taking care of me, and for not putting our family in a reality TV show.

Amen to that.