Broken Birds, The Story of My Momila

title: Broken Birds, The Story of My Momila
author: Jeannette Katzir
genre: memoir
pages: 374
published: 2009
first line: I hurried down the hallway but stopped when I saw her.
rated: 4 out of 5

Broken Birds, The Story of My Momila is inspired by author Jeannette Katzir's own experiences. Her parents are Holocaust survivors.
The book starts off with Jaclyn and her siblings showing up at the reading of their mothers will. Right off you can see there is some conflict between them for some reason or other. The story then takes a turn as her parents stories are told. Her mother Channa, and her father Nathan, survived the Holocaust as young adults. Channa was able to get away and live with her brother on the run in order to survive. Nathan was eventually sent to a concentration camp, but somehow managed to survive as well. They both lost family members and barely made it out alive.

As the sun was coming up one morning, the sounds of gunshots and shattering windows woke Rachel and her daughters. They ran over and looked out the window. Rachel knew instantly what was happening: a pogrom, an organized killing. They ran out the back door and sought entry to a hiding place beneath the house that they had prepared for such a moment. They crawled on their hands and knees and then on their bellies until they were deep inside. The earth was cold and wet, and the floorboards above them left little space for movement.

Once the war is over, Channa and Nathan move to the United States to try and start new lives. That is where the two meet and fall in love. Once married, the couple has five children. They live your average everyday lives, Channa mostly stays home while Nathan works and eventually starts up his own business. All the while you can see that Channa has deep rooted fears about her husband leaving her for 'someone better'. The war affected Channa so much that she deals with issues for the rest of her life. She is always afraid her husband will suddenly leave her and she is weary of and does not trust strangers. She eventually becomes a hoarder, as the direct effect of having to struggle to find food and nearly starving during the war.

It was moments such as these that I especially loved that momila of mine. Not because she gave me the lovely gift of furniture, but because she rose above her anger at being disobeyed and remembered that I was her daughter.

As the story goes on you get to see how these parents interact with their family. Jaclyn marries first and has a daughter. She is very close to her mother who is very old fashioned and a bit controlling. Jaclyn's sister Shirley is next to have a son. The two sisters are very close, but as time passes, they begin to have problems. They fight mostly over money and business issues since both their husbands end up owning their own businesses. There is alot of competition between the sisters, mostly due to Shirley's jealousy and resentment. All the while Channa insists that her children be loyal to one another, because family is what matters most.
She deals with medical issues for some time and when Channa has a stroke, all her children are at her side. And after she passes away, they gather to read her will, which is not what they expected it to be. Sadly what ensues is a drawn out legal battle between siblings over their mother's estate.

I tried very hard to accept the fact that Mom and Dad were broken birds, with horrific pasts that would always continue to haunt them. Mom's torturous past made her suspicious of the future. The present was simply a state of anticipation Mom endured as she waited for everything to go to pieces around her, just as it had in Baranavichy.

When I first started reading Broken Birds, The Story of My Momila I didn't know what to expect. I certainly didn't expect to find myself totally immersed in the story and unable to put the book down. It was interesting reading about the effects the Holocaust had on these survivors and how this trickled down to their own children, who weren't even born during the war. This is a great book club read, it's one of those books that makes for a great discussion. It's a book about the Holocaust, it's survivors and families.

Within the walls of that meditation suite were the consequences of Adolf Hitler's handiwork. Although he had been dead for years, he had been instrumental in shaping my parents and destroying this family. Mom and Dad lost their parents in those pivotal formative years. Their only proxy, The War, never taught them how to balance money, family, loyalty, love, and hate. Lacking those basic ideals, they raised us to view these same issues through distrusting eyes.