Anya

By Susan Fromberg Schaeffer

Book Overview

Anya Savikin lived among well-to-do Russian Jews in Poland, in a world more like Tolstoy's than our own, until the first bombing of Warsaw and the chaos that ensued. Her story incarnates the strength and love of eastern European Jewry, before and after their decimation. Reading group guide included.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393325210
• ISBN13: 9780393325218
• Release Date: February 2004
• Publisher: Norton & Company, Incorporated, W. W.
• Length: 489 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.5" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

Awesome, it looks like they are going to reprint this book

I thought it was such a pity that this book was out of print. It is hands down one of the best and most beautifully written books I have ever read. If you have read any of her other work, I've read a lot, this is maybe one of Schaeffer's best, and she is very gifted writer who writes with gorgeously poetic prose. Anya is a Russian jew who lives in Poland during World War 2. She is a newly wed with a dream about becoming a doctor, when Germany suddenly invades Poland. This book does a 180 and the gentle trivialities and worries of everday life are replaced by a new, cold harsh reality. You can almost believe that Anya is a real person. She is fallable and human, vulnerable and lovable. You can't help but admire her bravery throughout the story, and this story does not candy coat any part of the horrors these people had to face. Secondhand, and just as well fleshed out are the members of Anya's family, they live and breathe and make you care about them and you feel like you are looking back and remembering with Anya throughout the entire story. This book excellently conveys the warmth of Anya's mother, and her father's quiet, intellectual attitude. They remind me a lot of my Russian teachers. As a final note, I think this book is not only entertaining but it is a lesson about life and bravery and right and wrong. I found myself thinking about how lucky I was after I finished the story to live somewhere safe and free. This is definetly worth checking out, and I'm ecstatic that it will apparently be back in print again soon. Check here...

My first novel

My mother first told me about this book when I was 9 years old; she'd been so moved by it, she told me almost the whole story, so I read it for myself, my first "grown up" novel. Over the years, I came back to it again and again, and always found something fresh in the re-reading. It's a beautiful and heartbreaking story, and the details are so fresh and vivid, I always felt like I was visiting the home of someone I loved and had missed very much. I only wonder why it hasn't become more of a classic...

A young woman's unforgettable journey through the holocaust.

In a stunningly lyrical narrative, author Susan Fromberg Shaeffer has created an aching story of possession and loss, anguish and finally the healing of remembrance. With narrative woven as delicately as silk by the title character, Anya introduces the reader to her beloved family. As Jews in Poland, they have settled into a comfortable, happy life despite the segregation that hangs over their country. Beautiful, brilliant Anya enters medical school joyfully, and with equal joy shares life with with her family (who is, Anya's mother says, "too close, too close."). With perfect moments in her girlhood, and marriage to an adoring, ardent husband, Anya's life goes forth into another idyllic phase -- full of possibilities. When war crashes around her head with the bombing of Warsaw, life take a jagged turn into the unknown. With almost a capriousness, Nazis seize the fate of Anya, her family, and millions of other European Jews. The string of coincidence, luck, indifference, and tragedy turn this story into a kind of fable. In this book religion, superstition, goodness, evil and ignorance whisper secrets of potential life, and life denied. In the end, this remains a book not only to value for its perfect sadness, or even for the perplexity of the narrator herself as she examines her remarkable life, but also for the joy and poignancy in a life lived and kept alive through through a veil of remembrance and dreams. -- Iris Williamso