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    Eva and Eve: A Search for My Mother's Lost Childhood and What a War Left Behind
    Eva and Eve: A Search for My Mother's Lost Childhood and What a War Left Behind
    Eva and Eve: A Search for My Mother's Lost Childhood and What a War Left Behind
    Ebook417 pages5 hours

    Eva and Eve: A Search for My Mother's Lost Childhood and What a War Left Behind

    By Julie Metz

    3.5/5

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    In this unforgettable and “essential feminist memoir of women’s lives” (Sarah Wildman, author of Paper Love) the author of the New York Times bestselling memoir Perfection unearths her mother’s hidden past in in Nazi-occupied Austria.

    To Julie Metz, her mother, Eve, was the quintessential New Yorker. Eve rarely spoke about her childhood and it was difficult to imagine her living anywhere else except Manhattan, where she could be found attending Carnegie Hall and the Metropolitan Opera or inspecting a round of French triple crème at Zabar’s.

    After her mother passed, Julie discovered a keepsake book filled with farewell notes from friends and relatives addressed to a ten-year-old girl named Eva. This long-hidden memento was the first clue to the secret pain that Julie’s mother had carried as a refugee and immigrant from Nazi-occupied Vienna, shining a light on “a story of political repression, terror, and dissolution...full of astonishing and unlikely twists of fate showing again that individual destiny may be the greatest mystery of all” (Dani Shapiro, author of Inheritance).

    “A gripping and intimate wartime account with piercing contemporary relevance” (Kirkus Reviews), Eva and Eve lyrically traces one woman’s search for her mother’s lost childhood while revealing the resilience of our forebears and the sacrifices that ordinary people are called to make during history’s darkest hours.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAtria Books
    Release dateApr 6, 2021
    ISBN9781982128005
    Author

    Julie Metz

    Julie Metz is the New York Times bestselling author of Perfection. She has written for publications including The New York Times, Salon, Dame, Tablet, Catapult, and Glamour. She has received fellowships at Yaddo, MacDowell, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Vermont Studio Center. You can find out more about Julie’s writing life on Instagram: @JulieMetzWriter and her website: JulieMetz.com.

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    Reviews for Eva and Eve

    3.5/5

    15 ratings5 reviews

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    • 2/5
      She jumps all over. Her Jewish mother left Vienna in 1938–1940. She is searching to understand what happened to the mother & family during those years.Meanwhile, she bashes Trump, dislikes her mother, her daughter dislikes her… seems a bit disfunctionalI read half & skimmed the rest. Not very good
    • 5/5
      Mother and daughter stories will always be popular, both fiction and nonfiction. Julie Metz's new nonfiction, Eva and Eve- A Search For My Mother's Lost Childhood and What A War Left Behind takes Julie Metz from her mother's childhood home in Vienna to Trieste in Italy to Manhattan where her mother ended up when she escaped to America during WWII.Julie's mother Eve and her family lived in the beautiful city of Vienna, Austria. There was a vibrant Jewish community of 200,000 people there in the 1930s. (Post-war, it was 9000.) When Hilter came to power in Germany, his Nazi party wanted to reunify the Germans living in Austria, and so the anschlauss (annexation) of Austria began. The property of Jewish people were stolen by the Nazis- homes, businesses, property- and Eva's older brothers were sent to London to protect them from a Nazi neighbor who had a grudge against them. Eva and her parents stayed in Vienna, and soon they were trapped in their home, ten year-old Eva unable to even go to school.Eva's father Julius, with the help of some of the people who worked in the paper factory he owned, managed to raise enough money and get passports to get Julius, his wife Anna, and Eva to Italy and then on a boat to America where they settled in Brooklyn.After her mother died, Metz found a notebook in her mother's dresser drawer, filled with notes to Eva from her friends before the family left for America. Metz had a difficult relationship with her mother, who worked as an art director at Simon & Schuster publishers for many years, working her way up to an important position in the company.Metz decided to find out more about her Eve's life as a child, when she was known as Eva, to better understand her mother. Julie traveled to Vienna and found the home where Eva lived with her parents and the factory her father owned. With the help of some kind people, she was able to uncover through photos and artifacts what life was like for her mother and grandparents. She found photos and archival information about life for Jewish people during the anschlauss. She learned the details of how systematically the Nazis took everything away bit by bit from the Austrian Jewish population, deported them, and began to send them to concentration camps.Metz also visited Trieste, Italy, where her mother's family traveled and stayed for nine days, awaiting the ship that would take them to America. She followed in their footsteps to better understand what happened to them and others.Using both information she could verify and the feelings that she imagined her mother and family had as they watched their lives being taken away from them, Metz puts the reader into the minds of Eva and her family. We feel what they feel.Eva and Eve is also part travelogue. Metz takes the reader to Vienna and Trieste, two cities I didn't know much about. We get a real taste for the food and culture of both cities.If you only know about what happened in Austria during WWII from watching The Sound of Music or the one paragraph in your high school history book, reading Eva and Eve will give you a better perspective. On a microlevel, it examines how that trauma shaped the life of Eve, and how that affected her relationship with her daughter. I recommend it.
    • 4/5
      History is made up of people. We often look at the larger events without ever seeing the important, if smaller, details that effect the people on an intimate and personal level. But it's these details that coalesce to make the whole and in the case of the atrocities that led up to WWII and the Holocaust, it is these details that come together to show the full scope of the thing, from the macro level on down. In Eva and Eve, Julie Metz's part memoir, part biography, part history, Metz goes looking for the details that shaped her mother and in turn shaped herself.As Julie Metz watched her mother Eve die of colon cancer in 2006, she reflected on their relationship and the way that while Metz knew the broad strokes of her mother's life, Eve, and especially her childhood, was still an enigma to her. Finding a never before seen Poesiealbum or keepsake book of her mother's from childhood, she realizes that she wants to know the whole story, the story she only knows as pieces of family lore, and how that story is a part of the larger story of Viennese Jews fleeing the homeland they loved barely in advance of Hitler's Final Solution. Metz needed to know how Viennese Eva Singer became the quintessential New Yorker Eve Metz.Metz has done an impressive amount of research into her mother's life, using official documentation, family stories, interviews with her elderly uncles, photographs, and organizations committed to preserving the history of the war and the people who suffered so unfairly from it. When she cannot find photographic evidence, she speculates wholly believable scenes from her grandparents' and mother's lives although the scene she imagines of her grandparents' honeymoon is a bit uncomfortable and graphic. She movingly tells the story of her grandparents and her mother, their early years, the combination of knowledge and luck that kept her Jewish grandfather alive and necessary in Nazi-occupied Vienna, and the increasingly obvious need to leave Vienna for somewhere safer. In the course of this recounting, she also tells a little of the people who helped her family escape their home and of their life in America. Woven through this historical biography, Metz also weaves the larger history of the politics in Austria at the time and what Nazi-occupied Vienna was like as well as pieces of her own life, from when she was a student through her years researching of book, and throughout the decade following her mother's death. She draws parallels between the anti-immigration sentiment of the world, and specifically America, during WWII with the rising anti-immigration sentiment of the present. This is a very personal book and it definitely fills in many of the holes Metz has in understanding who her mother was and how she became that person. It is to our benefit that she allowed us to go along on the investigation with her.
    • 3/5
      grief, grieving, memoir***The author's mother had totally walled off her personal history regarding her family's flight from Europe in the time of Germany's ascendancy and never revealed any of it to her children. Not unusual for those who came to America at that time, but this family never faced the horrors that happened to so many others and the writer seems to believe that only one segment of the immigrants faced discrimination once in America. That and pushing her own political agenda was a great disappointment to me. Grief twists the past, even when discovered rather late.I requested and received a free ebook copy from Atria Books via NetGalley.
    • 4/5
      Eva and Eve: A Search for My Mother's Lost Childhood and What a War Left Behind from Julie Metz does what good memoir and history is supposed to do, revisit the past and bring it into conversation with the present. In this case the history and the journey are both personal and societal.First of all, I have to vent about something I don't understand. How can one love to read about a specific time period or event (writ large) without some part of that being about what the past can tell us about the present or any possible futures? In other words, if one likes to read Holocaust stories but feels that bringing what they say into the present is beside the point, what exactly is the point? Do they simply get enjoyment from reading about other people's pain and suffering without learning anything from it? Okay, I'm finished, I just don't understand some things very well.This memoir is ever so subtly layered while making many of the lessons, both personal and societal, very explicit. I was, of course, caught up in the dynamics of Metz' family history, how they handled a horrendous situation, how they managed to do what they did for their family. My interest, at first, was primarily historical through a personal lens, if that makes sense.I found myself very quickly invested in her present as well, the wonderfully difficult task of raising a child, of coping with the curves life, in the best of times, can throw at you. At this point, I was as invested in her family life as I was in her mother's family life. The historical had become very personal and the personal is always political.I found parts of the book more engaging than others but not in a like versus dislike way, more of a like and like a lot way. I also think that the writing is such that, when I reread this, I may well prefer other sections. Such is the nature of reading, it isn't simply the words on the page/screen, it is also where I am in my life while reading it, and where my society is while I am reading it. And right now the present feels surreal.I would recommend this to readers who like to read about life under Nazi rule as well as those who like memoirs that highlight family dynamics and the many little epiphanies that make up a life.Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.

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    Eva and Eve - Julie Metz

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