Survival Skills

“In this stunning memoir, which is also very much a work of history, Anne-Marie Foltz tells the astonishing story of her family’s displacement and survival from World War II Norway. Memory can be a tumultuous, mysterious, often hidden storehouse with no keys to open it. In adulthood Foltz finally found the right questions that unlocked her parents’ theretofore silent and conflicting memories of how and why they left the Nazi Holocaust in Norway.

The parents, Lova and David Abrahamsen, he, a distinguished psychiatrist and author, targeted by the Nazis and she, an extraordinarily courageous woman and mother of two daughters, saved their treasure trove of letters. David fled by ship to America, hoping the family could later reunite. During the winter 1940–1941, Lova, saved her life and the lives of her daughters in an epic trek from Norway to Sweden to Moscow, across the Soviet Union to Japan, by ship to Hawaii and San Francisco.

In their rich surviving letters both Lova and David use the word “unbelievable” to describe their realization that they will once again reunite, that a family can survive the most evil of forces. This story is almost unbelievable, except that we as readers are swept along on a well-documented odyssey that might have been ship-wrecked at any time. At once, a work of retrieval, history, personal revelation, Jewish consciousness, and wonderful storytelling, this book reminds us brilliantly that we are our pasts, as well as the presents and futures we make out of them.

This is a book about loss, but also renewal and the universal meaning of why life matters. Foltz has written a brave and compelling book. ”

—David W. Blight, Sterling Professor of History at Yale University, author of the Pulitzer Prize winning Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom