EVA AND EVE

In this memoir, a woman seeks to understand her mother’s final two years in Vienna—when she was restricted to her family’s apartment—and her first years in New York City as a young immigrant who escaped Nazi-occupied Austria.

In 1940, Eva Singer was just shy of 12 years old when she and her parents, Julius and Anna, were able to secure their American visas. Eva changed her name to Eve and tucked the trauma that shaped her life into mostly unspoken memory. After Eve’s death in 2006, Metz discovered, secreted deep in her mother’s dresser drawer, a keepsake book from 1938 through 1940. Known as a Poesiealbum, it contained a collection of signatures and good wishes from childhood friends and family, most of whom probably never survived the Holocaust. “Almost from the beginning,” the author writes, “my search felt like a séance, a conversation she and I never had when she was alive. A collaboration with a ghost.” Over the subsequent years, Metz made several trips to Vienna, networked with archival agencies and experts, and immersed herself in the physical, cultural, and gastronomic experiences of Vienna. In 2019, she took a van from Vienna to Trieste, Italy, in an approximate duplication of the Singers’ journey to the ship that would carry them to freedom, the Saturnia, eventually even acquiring a copy of the captain’s log from that voyage. Metz’s memoir is an elegant, evocative construction of chilling historical details, travelogue-style descriptions of present-day Vienna and Trieste, and imagined vintage vignettes that give texture and depth to the distinctive experiences of her mother and grandparents. Like many Holocaust-themed retrospectives, the Singer family’s story simultaneously speaks to the tales of millions of others caught in the horrors of World War II, most of whom could not obtain the lifesaving visas. The author also skillfully connects the inflamed passions of the 1930s and ’40s with the reemergence of the incendiary, xenophobic American White nationalist rhetoric and violence of today. Occasionally the narrative succumbs to some repetition as Metz meanders between past and present, but the story remains riveting.

A gripping and intimate wartime account with piercing contemporary relevance.