Sonia Taitz: First the 4-star novel, then the 4-star memoir

By Mad Dog
Published: Dec 19, 2012

I am a huge fan of Sonia Taitz’s novel, In the King’s Arms, the story of a young New York City woman who heads off to England — the obvious destination of any English grad student whose parents are Holocaust survivors — and has memorable romantic entanglements. Using much of the same material, she’s now written a memoir, “The Watchmaker’s Daughter.” My parents didn’t come here after surviving the concentration camps, but they were children of the Depression, which carried its own trauma. Which is to say: This story has hooks for a great many readers. Including the hook of gifted writing. Like the opening: “You could say that my father was a watchmaker by trade, but that would be like saying that Nijinsky liked to dance. Fixing watches was not only his livelihood but his life. This skill saved him when he had been imprisoned at the death camp of Dachau, during the Second World War, and he continued to fix watches until the day he died. Simon Taitz was nothing less than a restorer of time. And I was his daughter, born to continue his life work — restoration and repair.” [To buy the paperback from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]