Review by Susan Blumberg-Kason
Diane Botnick writes in the prologue of her novel, Becoming Sarah, that a midwife at Auschwitz delivered 3000 babies and most were brutally murdered as soon as they were born. Only 30 survived. She imagines what became of these babies and uses this premise to craft a sweeping story that spans 100 years into the past, present, and future. Through the fictional Sarah Vogel, Botnick explores questions that are not typical of Holocaust novels, namely what happens to survivors who are too young to remember the Holocaust and can a nurturing environment help them overcome the nature of their early childhood? For starters, the babies who survived Auschwitz didn’t even know their real names, if they even had names. It’s hard to know if their mothers survived long enough after giving birth to name them. They certainly knew nothing of their surnames as they grew up. As Botnick writes of her main character:
Somewhere along this path of shortening days, she became Sarah, one of many. In this camp, there were more Sarahs than a five-year-old could count…Only this Sarah, this accident, this curse of a baby girl, Auschwitz born and bred, who’d never known an elsewhere, had the gall to imagine there might be one.
Sarah was born in 1942 so by the time the concentration camps were liberated a few years later, she was old enough to have had numbers tattooed on her arm. This tattoo was her only connection to Judaism because she lived for the better part of a decade with a Christian family in Germany, minding their children and doing simple housework.
But no matter how much Sarah tried to lead a normal life—falling in love, having a baby, hoping to immigrate to Israel—she and her descendants just couldn’t escape the trauma from her childhood during the Holocaust. Instead of moving to Israel, Sarah immigrated to the United States and settled in Queens with her young daughter, Sasha. It was not easy to be a single mother and an immigrant right after the war, especially with little money and little education. This was also a time before the first wave of the feminist movement, so Sarah often felt powerless in her work and romantic relationships.
Orphaned, frozen, malnourished, heartbroken once and then again. How much easier to think there’d never been any choice at all than to live with the consequences of consistently bad ones.
The details of the 1950s, ’60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s are so vivid and accurate, whether it’s the type of cigarette people smoked or the music they listened to or the clothes they wore. Botnick also incorporates American trauma like the JKF assassination and breakthroughs like the moon landing, so her novel is both a Holocaust and an American story.
By the end of the book it’s pretty evident that generational trauma is almost impossible to overcome without therapy—a luxury Sarah wasn’t able to seek out in the 1950s and ‘60s—yet she survived and her family line, no matter how little was known of it, continued.
Becoming Sarah by Diane Botnick
She Writes Press, 2025, $17.99
9798896360001
Susan Blumberg-Kason is the author of a memoir and two biographies. She co-edited an anthology set in Hong Kong and is a regular contributor to Asian Review of Books, World Literature Today, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, and Los Angeles Review of Books.