The Forbidden Daughter

March 1, 2024
The Holocaust-era tale of an orphan girl who escaped the Nazi terror via a succession of Jewish families and relatives in Israel and America. Jakob is a relative of Elida Friedman, born in 1943 in the Kovno ghetto in Lithuania. Soon after her birth, Elida's parents, Jonah and Tzila Friedman, were murdered by the Nazis. In what she describes as a "biographical novel," the author reconstructs Elida's story, basing the narrative on a wide variety of sources, including "documents, certificates, court records, drawings, and letters in Elida's handwriting." Though Jews were forbidden from giving birth in Kovno, the Friedmans resisted the ban, giving the girl a name that means "nonbirth" in Hebrew. Desperate to save her, they engineered a scheme to have her smuggled out by a Christian Lithuanian family to their farm in Kelmuciai, hoping that Jonah's cousin Lazar could retrieve the girl after the war. Elida became "Rita," and she was well loved and taken care of. Following the war, she was adopted by a Jewish refugee couple from Russia who settled in Vilna. For years, growing up in the working-class Ruhin home as their only daughter, attending Russian schools, Elida gradually came to understand that they were withholding the truth about her past and that Lazar had been searching for her. Though she was sent to Israel to meet her remaining family, there was still no fixed home for her until Lazar and his wife took her to Texas and adopted her. A determined student with a gift for languages, Elida was often confused and angry, and Jakob depicts her as headstrong, precocious, and not always sympathetic. Nonetheless, Elida's story is miraculous, and this subjective narrative of her life captures it effectively. An engrossing tale with heart-rending details of its subject's difficult life at each trying stage.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

April 8, 2024
Jakob debuts with a poignant biography of her friend Elida Friedman, a Holocaust survivor who was “born in fire and died by fire.” Elida’s birth in 1943 was illegal, Jakob explains; the Nazis had strictly forbidden childbirth in the Jewish ghetto of Kovno, Lithuania, but her parents—Jonah, a doctor, and his wife Tzila, a nurse—delivered their baby in secret. They gave her a Hebrew name meaning “nonbirth” and smuggled her to a Christian Lithuanian family who owed Jonah a debt of gratitude for having saved one of their lives during an operation. The ghetto was liquidated shortly afterward, and Jonah and Tzila were murdered. Following the war, Elida was adopted by a Jewish couple, the Ruhins; when she learned the true story of her birth, she struggled emotionally in her new home, becoming an angry, difficult child. Elida and the Ruhins eventually relocated to Israel, where Elida reconnected with her father’s relatives; as a teenager, she was adopted by her father’s cousin. She later married and started her own family, before dying tragically young, at the age of 31, when the flight she and her husband were taking from Israel to the U.S. was bombed by Libyan-backed terrorists. In her novelistic and psychologically probing portrayal, Jakob captures how the aftereffects of trauma made Elida a tempestuous figure in the lives of those around her. It’s a captivating character study of survival and resilience.