Eva And Eve by Julie Metz

Eva and Eve by Julie Metz

Published by Atria ISBN 9781982127985

Hardcover, $28, 309 pages

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. 

Thanks to TLC Tours for putting me on Julie Metz's tour. The rest of her stops are here:

Friday 5ive- June 18, 2021

Welcome to the Friday 5ive, a weekly blog post about five things that caught my attention this week.

1) On Thursday night, my husband and I heard what we hoped was fireworks. We went out on our balcony and sure enough, there was barge in the East River shooting off fireworks. It was a few days too late for the Back to Normal celebration that New York State organized earlier in the week. Maybe it was practice for the Macys 4th of July Show?

2) My husband and I put together our new wine rack from Wine Enthusiast on Saturday. (Well, I held it together while my husband screwed in the 100 screws.) Thank goodness we had a cordless drill, we were able to finish in less than two hours. It's been awhile since we had to put furniture together.

3) I received the cutest invitation for our Beach Club Book Club meeting next month. The book is Jennifer Ryan's The Kitchen Front, about a cooking contest in England during WWII. I can't wait to read and discuss the book, if it's half as much fun as the invitation, it will be a great time.

4) We watched the hugely popular French TV series, Lupin, on Netflix this week. It tells the story of a man, Assane Diop, who sets about to avenge the false imprisonment and death of his father. Assane is a "gentleman thief", inspired by the French literature character Arséne Lupin, and it's a combination of Ocean's Eleven  and Sherlock Holmes. Omar Sy winningly portrays Assane Diop, a big man with a charming smile. It's fun to try and put the puzzle together as to what is happening. I forsee future Lupin tours of Paris, similiar to the Sex and the City tours in NYC. 

5) I read two terrific books this week. I stayed up late to finish in one day Laura Lippman's latest mystery, Dream Girl. Lippman has recently paid homage to books she loved Wilde Lake  (To Kill A Mockingbird), Sunburn (the novels of James M. Cain) and now she salutes Stephen King's Misery in Dream Girl. When writer Gerry Andersen is seriously injured in a fall at his Baltimore condo, he is bedridden and dependent on his young assistant Victoria, and the nurses and therapists who come to his home. He begins to get threatening phone calls from a woman who claims to be the character of his most famous book. Are these calls real or a figment of his imagination? It's a twisty mystery that goes back and forth in time through Gerry's life, and he has to take a look at how he has lived his life. and treated others, particularly the women, in his life. It's a fantastic, meaty mystery.

Julie Metz's nonfiction Eva and Eve, looks at the life of her mother, who escaped from Vienna with her parents during WWII. Metz and her mother had difficulties, and Metz hopes by visiting Vienna and Italy, where her mother spent nine days before boarding the ship to America, she will better understand her mother. If you only know about Austria's history during WWII from The Sound of Music or the brief mention of the Anschluss (annexation) of Austria by Germany in your high school history book, you'll learn so much more about that important moment in history. It also has relevance in today's world if you look at what Russia is trying to do with the Ukraine and other neighboring countries. It's an enlightening book. My full review publishes June 28th. 

Our apartment building has lifted all mask requirements for vaccinated people, and it seems like teh whole world has changed for the better. I hope all is well in your part of the world as we get back to normal.