This beautiful memoir opens with a heartbreaking portrait of the author’s mother, Sabina. On her deathbed in New London, Connecticut, Sabina offered “an unexpected glimpse” into her early life with her twin, Basia, and their ordeals during the Second World War. “She knew she didn’t have much time left,” Isa Milman writes of her mother, who spoke with a “voice that took on a rushing urgency.”
Milman sat in the hospital room “with pen and paper, madly trying to capture her words.” While Sabina implored her daughter to someday share the sisters’ story —“Isa, write this down, this should be your next book!”— the notes from that day in late 2006 simply “sat on my desk for years.” Gradually, as her grief began to soften, her mother’s exhortation returned with renewed persistence.
Born in 1917 in Kostopol, a Polish region of Ukraine, Sabina and Basia were living near Warsaw with their...
Zoya Merchant will begin a master’s degree at the University of Oxford this fall.
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