My Mother's Eyes: Holocaust Memories of a Young Girl

Rating:
Summary: Anna Ornstein's Eyes
Review: Anna Ornstein was my first psychiatry teacher in medical school, so that is my bias. When this short, powerful, articulate woman entered a lecture hall full of hypercritical American medical students like myself, what impressed me most was her courage. We were a tough audience of concrete-minded scientific reductionists, and she came with her heavily accented English and provoked us to think about feelings and the meaning of mind and emotions when we, lost and overwhelmed in a world of memorizing anatomical structures, metabolic pathways, and Nernst equations, were least ready for it.

As I learned more about the work of Prof. Ornstein and her equally impressive husband, I came to understand why she wasn't the least bit intimidated by our sophomoric arrogance (we were often merciless to lecturers).

The kindness and attentiveness of this short giant of a teacher, therapist, and theoretician, was equally as present, and most visually reflected in her strikingly bright, beautiful eyes that look like they miss nothing. (Yes, you detect the student's crush here.) What she and her husband have taught this poor student, as well as many good ones during their estimable careers, is the complexity and healing power of empathy. To have survived the holocaust and devoted a career to the study and teaching of empathy! Can there be a more powerful triumph?! Yet here is another; this wonderful little book.

This book is a gift of deeply personal remembrances. They are at the same time universal in their emotional power, because of Dr. Ornstein's ability to use words to bring her experience very near to the reader. She integrates in simple, eloquent prose the texture and emotions of the experiences. The imagery is as powerful as film, no, more so.

I cried my way through many of these memories. Though they were not my own, they were brought so close by Prof. Ornstein's words it felt as though they were. The tragedy that befell the Ornstein's and so many others, lost and surviving, uplifts and enriches as much is it hurts and warns. She has achieved her goal; those lost will not be totally lost because she has helped us to remember.

The illustrations are works of art, beautiful, powerful as well, and are a complement to the word pictures which nonetheless stand on there own.

Readers of this beautiful book will not forget these painful and beautiful pictures, seen through Anna Ornstein's eyes.