Why is the title I Have Lived a Thousand Years such an apt description of Elli’s young life?Ģ. Unforgettable first hand accounts of terrible times, these two books are also ringing tributes to the human spirit.ġ. “A valuable addition to any Holocaust collection.” Winner of a Christopher Award and an ALA Best Book for Young Adults, the book was followed by an equally acclaimed memoir of the author’s turbulent postwar years, My Bridges of Hope. “A gripping story,” School Library Journal added. “An exceptional story, exceptionally well told,” is how Publishers Weekly summed up I Have Lived a Thousand Years, Livia Bitton-Jackson’s memoir of coming of age in Nazi concentration camps.
My Bridges of Hope and I Have Lived a Thousand Years
Her strong will and faith allow Elli to manage and adjust, but what she doesn’t know is that this is only the beginning. Then she and her family are forced to leave their house behind to move into a crowded ghetto, where privacy becomes a luxury of the past and food becomes a scarcity. First Elli can no longer attend school, have possessions, or talk to her neighbors. A life in which Elli could lie and daydream for hours that she was a beautiful and elegant celebrated poet.īut these adolescent daydreams quickly darken in March 1944, when the Nazis invade Hungary. It wasn’t long ago that Elli led a normal life that included family, friends, school, and thoughts about boys. A remarkable memoir, I Have Lived a Thousand Years is a story of cruelty and suffering, but at the same time a story of hope, faith, perseverance, and love.
So wonders thirteen-year-old Elli Friedmann as she fights for her life in a Nazi concentration camp. Through a close reading of female Holocaust survivors’ memoirs, this essay shows how the brutal assault on gender gave birth–against all odds – to a new Jewish woman who not only overcomes the shock of being despoiled of her basic cultural and gender assets but uses this deprivation to rise above her condition and eventually to write her own self through what Helene Cixous calls “a language of revolution.What is death all about? What is life all about? The various literary figures that render, or rather testify to, a scene that is in every way repugnant to humanity in its violence, and the emphasis on the brutal physical aggression inflicted on women in Auschwitz underscore the resulting epistemological malaise.įrom the memoirs of Eva Edith Eger ( The Choice), Livia Bitton-Jackson ( I Have Lived a Thousand Years), Rena Kornreich Gellisen ( Rena's Promise), and Erna Rubinstein ( The Survivor in Us All), there emerges a collective portrait of the subversive Jewish woman who resists the heavy weight of the Nazi power. In their memoirs female Holocaust survivors recount the systematic misogynic attack of the female body in Auschwitz.
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