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Losing the Dead
After a lifetime spent steadfastly ignoring her parents' accounts of their struggle for survival in World War II Poland, novelist Lisa Appignanesi played the "ultimate generation game" as her mother's increasing old age impelled her to discover the truth about her family's past. Growing up as part of an immigrant Jewish family in Canada, she had recoiled at "the implicit message...that you could live through terrible things and come out at the other end to sip a glass of tea or Schnapps". Yet years later she found herself en route to Poland to "excavate" for herself the story of her parents' amazing endurance--and to reclaim her family history. Appignanesi's parents Hena and Aron, together with her older brother and maternal grandmother, had escaped certain death in the Warsaw ghetto by tenacity, audacity (especially on the part of her mother)- -and the ultimate suppression of their Jewish identity. To this end they were helped out enormously by the heroism and sacrifices of individuals and in particular by Hena's mysterious, fabled brother Arek, who disappeared from view in 1943. Losing the Dead swings effortlessly between Appignanesi's comedic childhood reminiscences, her tireless search through Polish archives and registers for forgotten identities and the dramatic, immediate narrative of her family's day-to-day existence in the terrifying war years. It is a story of loss and deprivation, yet ultimately one of profound understanding, as Appignanesi resurrects her past in order to lay it to rest, proving that Losing the Dead is a truly commemorative memoir.-- Catherine Taylor
232 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1999
About the author
Lisa Appignanesi
59 books101 followersaka Jessica Ayre
Elżbieta Borensztejn was born on 4 January 1946 in Łódź, Poland, the daughter of Hena and Aaron Borensztejn with Jewish origin. Following her birth, her parents moved to Paris, France, and in 1951 they emigrating to Canada. She grew up in the province of Quebec - first in a small Laurentian town, subsequently in Montreal.
She graduated from McGill University with a B.A. degree in 1966 and her M.A. the following year. During 1970-71 she was a staff writer for the Centre for Community Research in New York City and is a former University of Essex lecturer in European Studies. She was a founding member and editorial director of the Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative. Through the eighties she was a Deputy Director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, UK, for whom she also edited the seminal Documents Series and established ICA television and the video Writers in Conversation series.
She produced several made for television films and had written a number of books before devoting herself to writing fulltime in 1990. In recognition of her contribution to literature, Lisa Appignanesi has been honoured with a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres from the French government. In 2004, she became Deputy President of English PEN and has run its highly successful 'Free Expression is No Offence Campaign' against the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill. In 2008 she became President of English PEN. She writes for The Guardian, The Independent and has made several series for BBC Radio 4, as well as frequently appearing as a cultural commentator.
In 1967, she married Richard Appignanesi, another writer, with whom she had one son in 1975, Josh Appignanesi, a film director. They divorced in 1984. With her life partner John Forrester, she had a daugther, Katrina Forrester, a Research Fellow in the history of modern political thought at St John's College, Cambridge. She lives in London.
Elżbieta Borensztejn was born on 4 January 1946 in Łódź, Poland, the daughter of Hena and Aaron Borensztejn with Jewish origin. Following her birth, her parents moved to Paris, France, and in 1951 they emigrating to Canada. She grew up in the province of Quebec - first in a small Laurentian town, subsequently in Montreal.
She graduated from McGill University with a B.A. degree in 1966 and her M.A. the following year. During 1970-71 she was a staff writer for the Centre for Community Research in New York City and is a former University of Essex lecturer in European Studies. She was a founding member and editorial director of the Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative. Through the eighties she was a Deputy Director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, UK, for whom she also edited the seminal Documents Series and established ICA television and the video Writers in Conversation series.
She produced several made for television films and had written a number of books before devoting herself to writing fulltime in 1990. In recognition of her contribution to literature, Lisa Appignanesi has been honoured with a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres from the French government. In 2004, she became Deputy President of English PEN and has run its highly successful 'Free Expression is No Offence Campaign' against the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill. In 2008 she became President of English PEN. She writes for The Guardian, The Independent and has made several series for BBC Radio 4, as well as frequently appearing as a cultural commentator.
In 1967, she married Richard Appignanesi, another writer, with whom she had one son in 1975, Josh Appignanesi, a film director. They divorced in 1984. With her life partner John Forrester, she had a daugther, Katrina Forrester, a Research Fellow in the history of modern political thought at St John's College, Cambridge. She lives in London.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
September 17, 2019
A beautiful memoir; a study of memory, history, and transgenerational haunting, and how they impact the present. Appignanesi is a beautiful writer. I was particularly fascinated by her accounts of how her mother's Aryan looks acted as an antidote, or at least a barrier to, her oppression as a Jewish person during WWII: 'A slip of the Aryan mask to reveal the Jew beneath would mean death.' - page 151.
Favourite quotes:
I suspect they passed these patterns on to my brother and me, as surely as they passed on their genes and with as little choosing. Understanding this transgenerational haunting is part of the journey—and perhaps in a century where migration, forced or chosen, is the norm, it is its most common part. Memory, like history, is uncontrollable. It manifests itself in unruly ways. It cascades through the generations in a series of misplaced fears, mysterious wounds, odd habits. The child inhabits the texture of these fears and habits, without knowing they are memory. - page 8-9.
Only when I landed in Britain as a graduate student, did it come to me that not all people told their entire life's history on the first meeting. Only immigrants do that. When your roots are long and deep and safely earthed in the back garden with the roses, there's no need. Then it my be insulting or an invasion of privacy to probe. - page 25-26.
I guess I owed their equanimity to the war. Confrontation with death—too much of it, too brutal—has a way of making all other upheavals dwindle in importance. I suspect my main legacy from my parents is that they gave me a kind of deep fatalism. The worst has already happened and is bound to happen again. In the meantime, one is grateful. Grateful for small kindnesses and small generosities. Grateful for the gift of life. And free to be an optimist from day to day. - page 76.
The familiar irony of all this doesn't escape me. This is the ultimate generation game. All my friends are playing it. We are suddenly interested in our parents' pasts which we feel are linked with our own buried ones. Children of Freud and his miscarriage to the rebellious sixties which put youth, only youth, on a pedestal, we root around, often too late, in the family romance and sometimes excavate dark secrets. We are hungry for knowledge. If it doesn't, at its best, bring mutual understanding or forgiveness, or, at its worst, an excuse for personal failure, at least it may bring a kind of peace. Perhaps even a childhood talisman to inure us against old age. - page 90.
History makes sense of a memory. It gives one a grid for individual experience. - page 92.
As we approach the millennium, it seems we are all preoccupied by memory. To construct a future, we need to unearth new narratives of the past. Pasts which have been buried by repressive regimes and left to fester or pasts transformed by Cold War politics; or simply pasts relegated to the limbo of latency because they are too painful to think about. - page 185.
Maybe that's all I'm doing here in Poland, too. Losing the dead all over again. - page 220.
There's a kind of panic that sets in for women when attractiveness can no longer be counted on to induce the kindness of strangers. - page 257.
Favourite quotes:
I suspect they passed these patterns on to my brother and me, as surely as they passed on their genes and with as little choosing. Understanding this transgenerational haunting is part of the journey—and perhaps in a century where migration, forced or chosen, is the norm, it is its most common part. Memory, like history, is uncontrollable. It manifests itself in unruly ways. It cascades through the generations in a series of misplaced fears, mysterious wounds, odd habits. The child inhabits the texture of these fears and habits, without knowing they are memory. - page 8-9.
Only when I landed in Britain as a graduate student, did it come to me that not all people told their entire life's history on the first meeting. Only immigrants do that. When your roots are long and deep and safely earthed in the back garden with the roses, there's no need. Then it my be insulting or an invasion of privacy to probe. - page 25-26.
I guess I owed their equanimity to the war. Confrontation with death—too much of it, too brutal—has a way of making all other upheavals dwindle in importance. I suspect my main legacy from my parents is that they gave me a kind of deep fatalism. The worst has already happened and is bound to happen again. In the meantime, one is grateful. Grateful for small kindnesses and small generosities. Grateful for the gift of life. And free to be an optimist from day to day. - page 76.
The familiar irony of all this doesn't escape me. This is the ultimate generation game. All my friends are playing it. We are suddenly interested in our parents' pasts which we feel are linked with our own buried ones. Children of Freud and his miscarriage to the rebellious sixties which put youth, only youth, on a pedestal, we root around, often too late, in the family romance and sometimes excavate dark secrets. We are hungry for knowledge. If it doesn't, at its best, bring mutual understanding or forgiveness, or, at its worst, an excuse for personal failure, at least it may bring a kind of peace. Perhaps even a childhood talisman to inure us against old age. - page 90.
History makes sense of a memory. It gives one a grid for individual experience. - page 92.
As we approach the millennium, it seems we are all preoccupied by memory. To construct a future, we need to unearth new narratives of the past. Pasts which have been buried by repressive regimes and left to fester or pasts transformed by Cold War politics; or simply pasts relegated to the limbo of latency because they are too painful to think about. - page 185.
Maybe that's all I'm doing here in Poland, too. Losing the dead all over again. - page 220.
There's a kind of panic that sets in for women when attractiveness can no longer be counted on to induce the kindness of strangers. - page 257.
February 2, 2020
Lisa Appignanesi has written a factual, semi autobiographical book in which she recounts her parents experience of surviving the German occupation of Poland. Their story is terrible, heartbreaking and hopeful and confirms the horror of the treatment the Jewish people by the Nazis. The writer also recounts her own experiences and feelings regarding her childhood growing up as a child of Jewish immigrants.
This book came very close to being abandoned and classed as a DNF but out of respect for those who suffered and died during the Second World War, I pushed on. The story of the writer’s parents was the backbone of this book but, in my opinion, the writer didn’t give enough time/credit to it and concentrated more on herself to the point where I wondered why it wasn’t just the author’s autobiography.
This was my book club’s January choice and it’s not something I would have chosen myself.
This book came very close to being abandoned and classed as a DNF but out of respect for those who suffered and died during the Second World War, I pushed on. The story of the writer’s parents was the backbone of this book but, in my opinion, the writer didn’t give enough time/credit to it and concentrated more on herself to the point where I wondered why it wasn’t just the author’s autobiography.
This was my book club’s January choice and it’s not something I would have chosen myself.
December 12, 2015
An interesting story of a woman trying to understand her parents, both of whom miraculously survived the II world war whilst Jewish in Poland.
December 25, 2024
A strong and perceptive memoir that works across three timelines simultaneously. There is the chronological advance through the author's own life, the episodic chronology of her parent's war years and their aftermath, then the reverse chronology that examines how the traces of this past can be found within the present.
Appignanesi returns to her birth country of Poland in the 1980s and 1990s to explore in evermore engaged ways the origins of her Jewish family. There is the mystery of her Uncle Adek, who disappears mid-war having managed to successfully pass himself off as non-Jewish. There are the myriad family secrets that come to the surface: the flirtations, the affairs, the double-crossing, the perpetual fear and anxiety. There is also the ways in which the war impacts the safe adult working lives of both parents in Canada post-WWII, as well as how these strange resonances filter down to the author and her older brother - a kind of 'ghost language' as she describes it.
What is crucially significant in the memoir is how it addresses memory and the transmission of inter-generational trauma. Appignanesi is loathe to make too much of what has been imprinted on her by her parents, and yet it comes out in the interstices between different recollections of events. When confronted with contemporary Poland the author finds herself with answers for difficult childhood memories of her granny's decline after a stroke, as well as a terrifying nightmare of a toeless man. Yet so many more questions swell up out of the public records, recollections and memorials. How does one 'lose the dead' that make so much of the weight of these memories?
Very clearly a groundbreaking book, but one that may well have lost a little of its power to surprise in the intervening years.
Appignanesi returns to her birth country of Poland in the 1980s and 1990s to explore in evermore engaged ways the origins of her Jewish family. There is the mystery of her Uncle Adek, who disappears mid-war having managed to successfully pass himself off as non-Jewish. There are the myriad family secrets that come to the surface: the flirtations, the affairs, the double-crossing, the perpetual fear and anxiety. There is also the ways in which the war impacts the safe adult working lives of both parents in Canada post-WWII, as well as how these strange resonances filter down to the author and her older brother - a kind of 'ghost language' as she describes it.
What is crucially significant in the memoir is how it addresses memory and the transmission of inter-generational trauma. Appignanesi is loathe to make too much of what has been imprinted on her by her parents, and yet it comes out in the interstices between different recollections of events. When confronted with contemporary Poland the author finds herself with answers for difficult childhood memories of her granny's decline after a stroke, as well as a terrifying nightmare of a toeless man. Yet so many more questions swell up out of the public records, recollections and memorials. How does one 'lose the dead' that make so much of the weight of these memories?
Very clearly a groundbreaking book, but one that may well have lost a little of its power to surprise in the intervening years.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
October 28, 2022
I had thought that my extensive reading about the Holocaust had gotten me to where I was almost inured to the human capacity for degradation only to have my sensibilities discomfited anew by Lisa Appignanesi's book about her parents' World War II experiences, which include her father's account of how his starvation time in a labor camp brought him to the knowledge that only animal feces and not human feces are edible for humans. Almost visceral that made her account for me, just as her citing of the 1946 Kielce pogrom in which 42 Jewish refugees were slaughtered put me in mind of an experience of my own as a military dependent when my family visited Oradour, France, where 642 civilians were massacred by the SS. So affected was I by Oradour that years later an essay I wrote about the massacre had my senior English class teacher specially remarking on my essay – and it hadn't even been about something that had actually happened to me or anybody in my family. How much more affecting it must have been for Appignanesi to have written about horrors suffered by her own parents. And all rendered in prose so gorgeous as to have me actively seeking out her other works. Don't pass on this author.
March 10, 2022
An intriguing story about the life of Miss Lisa and her family during WW2 and post-WW2. From the story, I was able to feel how living as a Jews was like during that period and it is definitely not something that anyone should go to. Miss Lisa was able to bring out the fear of being found and the bravery to live through another day very well. The consequences of the War were also dire as can be seen in the life of her parents.
Overall, it was an interesting but sad story and I am glad that this is all over. War can only brings about devastation, sorrow and misery.
Overall, it was an interesting but sad story and I am glad that this is all over. War can only brings about devastation, sorrow and misery.
September 20, 2021
A memoir of a Jewish Polish family, written by the youngest member of the family, a daughter, born in 1946. A harrowing tale of survival in occupied Poland through WWII.
March 20, 2018
I feel bad rating this 2 stars - how am I able to judge the story of people surviving through the Holocaust? - but I just didn't enjoy 'Losing the Dead' that much. Appignanesi makes some interesting points, but in terms of narrating families' stories during this time, 'Maus' was much better.
April 10, 2009
This was a well-written memoir!
From dust jacket:
As her mother slipped into the darkness of old age, Lisa Appignanesi began to realize how little she knew of the reality behind the tales she had heard since childhood. She had shunned her parents' stories of wartime Poland, but now she set out to find the truth, to untangle myth from fact, memory from wilful forgetting. In her quest she flew to Warsaw and on to the other smaller towns, scouring archives, walking streets, exploring cemeteries - imaginig and revisiting a past she never knew.
This beautiful, haunting memoir moves backwards from the comedy of an uneasy childhood in Paris and Quebec with her Jewish immigrant family, to the earlier lives of her parents, Hena and Aron, and her stalwart grandmother and glamorous, elusive uncle, and their epic struggle for surivial in Nazi Poland. It is a tale of cunning and masquerades, of good fortune and bursts of heroism. In the background are the shadows of the Ghetto and the deathcamps; in the foreground the details of daily life, the hiding of goods, the hunt for food, the disguises and subterfuges, the quarrels and loyalties, the daring escapes and the constant fear.
This is the moving, untold story of the Jews who survived outside the camps. But it is also the author's own voyage of self-discovery - a family memoir of the rites of passage of emigration, childhood and growing up an outsider in a closed community. And through it all runs another virbant thread: her relationship with her mother, an extraordinary, fearless, flawed personality. Gradually, as we follow her quest, we come to see that reviving the past and then letting it go - losing the dead - is a true route to understanding.
From dust jacket:
As her mother slipped into the darkness of old age, Lisa Appignanesi began to realize how little she knew of the reality behind the tales she had heard since childhood. She had shunned her parents' stories of wartime Poland, but now she set out to find the truth, to untangle myth from fact, memory from wilful forgetting. In her quest she flew to Warsaw and on to the other smaller towns, scouring archives, walking streets, exploring cemeteries - imaginig and revisiting a past she never knew.
This beautiful, haunting memoir moves backwards from the comedy of an uneasy childhood in Paris and Quebec with her Jewish immigrant family, to the earlier lives of her parents, Hena and Aron, and her stalwart grandmother and glamorous, elusive uncle, and their epic struggle for surivial in Nazi Poland. It is a tale of cunning and masquerades, of good fortune and bursts of heroism. In the background are the shadows of the Ghetto and the deathcamps; in the foreground the details of daily life, the hiding of goods, the hunt for food, the disguises and subterfuges, the quarrels and loyalties, the daring escapes and the constant fear.
This is the moving, untold story of the Jews who survived outside the camps. But it is also the author's own voyage of self-discovery - a family memoir of the rites of passage of emigration, childhood and growing up an outsider in a closed community. And through it all runs another virbant thread: her relationship with her mother, an extraordinary, fearless, flawed personality. Gradually, as we follow her quest, we come to see that reviving the past and then letting it go - losing the dead - is a true route to understanding.
February 16, 2016
A very personal account of the Third Reich and post war trauma from the viewpoint of a Polish Jew. The book jumps between the author's search for truth and family history and the events her parents' families were subjected to during the Third Reich.
There cannot be enough books written about the atrocities committed during this time, for us to never forget what happened and never let it happen again. These accounts put faces to numbers and bring closer what restrictions and the torture committed meant to individual people.
There cannot be enough books written about the atrocities committed during this time, for us to never forget what happened and never let it happen again. These accounts put faces to numbers and bring closer what restrictions and the torture committed meant to individual people.
February 28, 2016
a view of the horror the Jews endure in the war , injustice to a race , so much miseries and millions died.
October 13, 2014
A great story, greatly narrated
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews