خیاطی

From its opening pages, in which she recounts her own premature birth, triggered by terrifying rumors of an incipient pogrom, Bernsteins tale is clearly not a typical memoir of the Holocaust. She was born into a large family in rural Romania and grew up feisty and willing to fight back physically against anti-Semitism from other schoolchildren. She defied her fathers orders to turn down a scholarship that took her to Bucharest, and got herself expelled from that school when she responded to a priest/teachers vicious diatribe against the Jews by hurling a bottle of ink at him. After a series of incidents that ranged from dramatic escapes to a year in a forced labor detachment, Sara ended up in Ravensbruck, a womens concentration camp, and managed to survive. She tells this story with style and power. --Kirkus Reviews