The Watchmaker's Daughter: A Memoir

Named a Best Memoir of the Year by ForeWord Magazine

Nominated for the Sophie Brody Medal by the AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION

Featured on Beatrice Podcast (Ron Hogan), LIFE STORIES: THE ART OF THE MEMOIR

One of the year's best reads. This poignant memoir is a beautiful and heartfelt tribute to the author's parents. Funny, yet moving, The Watchmaker's Daughter illuminates Sonia's Taitz's life growing up in New York City, the daughter of Holocaust survivors... It is the story of an ambitious and gifted daughter whose aspirations and goals collide with those of her parents.--The Jewish Journal

There have been many books written on the Holocaust but few about being the daughter of concentration camp survivors. The love that Sonia has for her parents, in spite of all their flaws, is truly amazing. Her experiences and the people she meets open her parents' eyes and help them heal. --BOOKAHOLICS

The burden of being the child of Holocaust survivors is a heavy one to bear. Many have written about it, but few have done so as artfully as Sonia Taitz. With her new memoir, The Watchmaker's Daughter, she takes us on a post-World War II American coming-of-age journey that differs from most. This is obviously because of the genocidal shadow cast over it, but it is also thanks to Taitz's extraordinary ability to turn a phrase and draw us in to the intense world of a daughter who knows too well that in crucial ways her life is not completely her own.--The Jerusalem Report

Not your typical coming-of-age story....American Sonia Taitz, born to survivors of the Holocaust, lives under its long shadow in The Watchmaker's Daughter.--Vanity Fair

Funny and heartwrenching.--People Magazine

Taitz writes beautifully about religious roots, generational culture clashes, and a family's abiding love.--Reader's Digest

An invigorating memoir...especially noteworthy for its essential optimism and accomplished turns of phrase. -- Kirkus Reviews

Sonia Taitz, born to survivors of the Holocaust, lives under its long shadow in The Watchmaker's Daughter. -- Elissa Schappell, Vanity Fair

Even now, as the last Holocaust survivors pass away, wrenching reverberations run through Taitz's poignant, poetic memoir. -- Booklist

A heartbreaking memoir of healing power and redeeming devotion, Sonia Taitz's The Watchmaker's Daughter has the dovish beauty and levitating spirit of a psalm. The suffering and endurance of Taitz' parents -- Holocaust death camp graduates who met at the Lithuanian Jewish Survivor's Ball in a New York hotel (imagine Steven Spielberg photographing that dance floor tableau) -- form the shadow-hung backdrop of a childhood in a high-octance, postwar America where history seems weightless and tragedy a foreign import -- a Hollywood paradise of perky blondes, Pepsodent smiles, and innocent high-school hijinks where our author and heroine longs to fit in. Although the wonder years that Taitz scrupulously, tenderly, beautifully, often comically renders aren't that far removed from us, they and the Washington Heights she grew up in, the shop where her father repaired watches like a physician tending to the sick tick of life itself, the grand movie houses where the image of Doris Day sunshined the giant screen, have acquired the ache and poignance of a lost, Kodachrome age. A past is here reborn and tenderly restored with the love and absorption of a daughter with a final duty to perform, a last act of fidelity. -- James Wolcott, New Yorker and Vanity Fair cultural critic and author of the memoir Lucking Out

Sonia Taitz has a good heart and an unmortgaged soul. Follow where she leads. You want to go there. -- John Patrick Shanley, Pulitzer, Tony, and Oscar-Winning author of Moonstruck and Doubt

Sonia Taitz captures time in this deeply moving memoir of a women's journey back to herself. A love letter to a long ago New York, The Watchmaker's Daughter is written with a wise eye and a generous heart. Unforgettable! -- Christina Haag, author of Come to the Edge

Sonia Taitz's memoir of growing up as the daughter of a master watchmaker who survived the Holocaust is also a haunting meditation on the nature of time itself. With a painter's eye and a poet's voice, she conveys how it took her away from her loving but fearful parents then brought her back again, and allowed her to blossom as a modern American woman. -- Mark Whitaker, former Editor-in-Chief of Newsweek and author of the memoir My Long Trip Home

Heartwrenching, moving, and yes, hilarious, Taitz's extraordinary memoir explores culture clash, Jewish roots, and the struggle to break the bonds of the past and forge your own kind of Promised Land future. But it's also an astonishing love letter to Taitz's Holocaust survivor parents, one that's so fiercely tender and gorgeously written that each page seems like a revelation. -- Caroline Leavitt, New York Times bestselling author of Pictures of You

Sonia Taitz's memoir of coming of age in postwar America is unusually gentle, loving, and insightful. Her parents' indelible experience in the Holocaust is a constant presence, but the author's compelling story is anchored by her own battles with conflicting notions of success and values. The book's understanding of family dynamics and the realities of the American Dream will resonate with us all. -- Joshua Halberstam, author of A Seat at the Table

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