The Printed Page

Title: Bending Toward the Sun: A Mother and Daughter Memoir
Author/website: Leslie Gilbert-Lurie/Bending Toward the Sun
354 pages
Publisher: Harper Collins
Publication date: September ’09
Genre: Memoir
Would I recommend it: Yes
For me this was an emotionally exhausting read. Even though the weight of the book didn’t change it felt heavier in my hands as I read towards the end. The pain is almost unbearable and I’m experiencing it from a great distance through the pages of a memoir. I can’t even begin to understand what it’s like to live with these type of crippling feelings. There is so much family trauma and drama that I almost didn’t pick it up for a second day of reading. I didn’t have any good reasons not to finish but I wasn’t sure I wanted to be drawn back into the upheaval taking place within these pages. I did finish and especially enjoyed Chapter 26 where Leslie, Gwyn and some family members travel to Poland to film the documentary, Voices from the Attic. This trip becomes a homecoming of sorts for the sisters. They visited the homes of their great-parents and their mother. They meet with Maria Grajolski and her family. It was Mrs. Grajolski’s attic that Rita hide in for 2 years along with 14 of her relatives.

The Holocaust (warning graphic photos) was something I studied in school. I’m not aware of any immediate family or acquaintance connections. In my mind I have images of Holocaust survivors yet I don’t consciously associate this time as being recent enough in history for there to be 1st generation survivors. That said we are only 64 years removed from the end of WWII. Until reading Bending Toward the Sun I never gave any thought to how the generations of children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren with direct family ties to this time in history cope with the inhumane atrocities inflicted on their grandparents and parents. There is a legacy of traumatized human emotions transmitted through family interaction. There are important messages to us all within these pages and we’d do well to take notice. The messages aren’t just for survivors of the Holocaust and their families. Any family or individual who has suffered horrific trauma will likely find a piece of their emotional state within these pages.

Rita Lurie was five years old when she was forced to flee her home in Poland to hide from the Nazis. From the summer of 1942 to mid-1944, she and fourteen members of her family shared a nearly silent existence in a cramped, dark attic, subsisting on scraps of raw food. Young Rita watched helplessly as first her younger brother then her mother died before her eyes. Motherless and stateless, Rita and her surviving family spent the next five years wandering throughout Europe, waiting for a country to accept them. The tragedy of the Holocaust was only the beginning of Rita’s story.

Decades later, Rita is a mother herself, the matriarch of a close-knit family in California. Yet in addition to love, Rita unknowingly passes to her children feelings of fear, apprehension, and guilt. Her daughter Leslie, an accomplished lawyer, media executive, and philanthropist, began probing the traumatic events of her mother’s childhood to discover how Rita’s pain has affected not only Leslie’s life and outlook but also Leslie’s daughter’s, Mikaela’s. A decade-long collaboration between mother and daughter, Bending Toward the Sun reveals how deeply the Holocaust remains in the hearts and minds of survivors, influencing even the lives of their descendants. It also sheds light on the generational reach of any trauma, beyond the initial victim. Drawing on interviews with the other survivors and with the Polish family who hid five-year-old Rita, Leslie and Rita bring together the stories of three generations of women—mother, daughter, and granddaughter—to understand the legacy that unites, inspires, and haunts them all.