The Butcher's Daughter: A Memoir

Haunting and spare, The Butcher's Daughter is a riveting memoir of multi-generational survivors. Florence Grende was born in Europe at the close of World War 2. Her parents survived in the countryside as partisans. Her father lost his young wife and two daughters, her mother lost her father and brother, as well as many other family members.Der Melhamar hung over her youth like darkness, hovering and waiting to seep back into her life. Long before Post Traumatic Stress, survivors ignored the past, moving forward as if nothing had happened. Silence was thick with the unsaid, the unimaginable, yet it was always there. Like a dark shadow, the impact of the war followed her family, shaping who they were, their happiness and despair and propelled them into the future. Their war-scarred life became a touchstone for every decision.War creates victims, but the lasting damage travels down through the generations leaving its mark forever. Touching and poignant, Grende strips away artifice and writes a raw accounting of her existence with people who cannot explain why they are whom they are, and how the past damaged them irrevocably, preventing the peace they need so desperately.Heartfelt and real, a lasting testimony of survival and the human spirit that that should not be forgotten.

The Butcher’s Daughter: A Memoir is by Florence Grende. This Holocaust memoir is written in a different manner than others I have read as it is written not by those who lived through the Holocaust but by a second generation girl. It is quite choppy and at times it doesn’t seem to go together. This could possibly be because she didn’t remember details or it could be the fact that her parents never talked about their experiences during the war. Feigeh grew up with an erratic Mother who was not loving or mothering. She broke into rages at times which resulted in her husband yelling back. When her second child was born, she tried to kill him and then refused the baby in the hospital saying hers had died. Throughout her life, Feigeh tried to fit in but she talked very sparingly in school and was different until they moved to Pelham Parkway in the Bronx where they lived with family. Here, she fought with her Mother to have friends. We finally find out the story of her parents which helps explain some things about her Mother. However, the memoir is depressing and the way it is written just exacerbates the depressing feeling. As you read, you begin to understand why she writes like she does and it gets easier to read. Like any Holocaust memoir, it is hard to say that you like the book when, because of the subject, you really don’t. it is definitely one which should be read.

From the cover image of the woods in Poland where Grende's parents barely survived for two years during the Holocaust, and through each of the short chapters written in spare, unsentimental prose, this memoir will grab you and haunt you. It will force you to face -- in a very personal, rather than a universal, way -- the horrors visited upon Grende's parents and millions of others of their generation, and the resulting family dysfunction confounding and harming their off-spring. In this book, I learned for the first time of the One by One program in Wannsee, Germany, which facilitates, among other things, "the interruption of the intergenerational transmission of trauma, prejudice and group hatred," and was glad of the knowledge. This is an extraordinary and shattering book that should be required reading, lest we forget. I know that I will read it again.

Twenty years in the crafting, Florence Grende's memoir is a sparklingly fresh, spare, and stunning account – filled with rich, sensory detail -- of growing up as a daughter of Holocaust survivors, a childhood marked by an ever-present atmosphere of guilt, rage, and silence. It is also the story of assimilation – a young girl’s heroic (and at times humorous) efforts to fit into the post-World War II American experience, while still preserving the family’s traditional Eastern European Jewish culture.This is a brilliant book, a must-read memoir. I highly recommend it.

I was grabbed from the first page and I couldn't put it down. Finishing a book in 2 sittings doesn't happen very often. Not knowing anything about the Partisan resistance in the Polish forests, and having recently viewed the Daniel Craig film "Defiance" [recommended] about the Bielski brothers' fight for the survival of hundreds of WWII Jews fleeing imminent genocide, the book both completed this open subject in my mind while giving me an insight into the impact on other survivor's 2nd generation offspring. A number of unique writing techniques grabbed my attention and revealed the multi-level dynamics of the interaction between immigrant survivors and their children attempting to build a new life in a strange new land. This is a book that I shall not forget and will surely read again very soon. Thank you Florence Grende for letting us into your very personal superb memoir. I hope that you continue to write as you definitely have that special talent and spark.

I was riveted while reading The Butcher's Daughter, A Memoir. Ms. Grende tells a very intimate and powerful tale about so many things...family, WWII, the Nazis, survival, tragedy and triumph, emigration to a new country, and her family integrating to varying degrees to it.Given the current state of the world, with the largest number of refugees since the War, their struggles, successes, failures and tragedies, I think our president should be sent a copy and hopefully he and his family will read it. Thank you Florence Grende for telling your story !Larry NYC

I think what amazed most about this memoir was the sheer bravery the author displayed taking on the task of mining for the truth of her parents--all the awful represented in the present, that is, after she was born not having been a victim directly of the Holocaust. But that almost doesn't matter because the trauma is passed down to her. How could it not be? The complexity of her life, her upbringing, given her parents' having suffered so, is both hard to read and written as a literary writer does when creating art.