In my opinion there is no harder book to write than a family memoir. After all, this is a story not only about the author but also about their most formative connections and all the invisible baggage those relationships pass on. The genre itself almost makes it impossible to achieve the distance a good memoir requires… Many writers who attempt memoirs either lose themselves in nostalgia or retreat into self-protection. Switocz Goldbloom has done none of that here and additionally provided a masterclass of how an unforgettable memoir can be written.

…What Alice Switocz Goldbloom has learned about her parents compelled her to record their lives in the just-published book Family Secrets. The stories it contains are both revelatory and timely.

While the drama of the war and its trauma draw the reader’s attention, the book is also the story a woman’s journey, about how finding the missing pieces of a life were critical to the author’s understanding of herself.

…masterful job of wearving her parents’ stories with historical narrative.

“I wanted the book to be balanced between intimate family memoir and the history.”

In researching the story her parents never told, Alice came to a unique understanding of her roots and of the magnitude of what they had endured.

Alice marvels at what her mother kept sealed away…

“And perhaps that was her greatest act of mothering: to keep sealed away the story of a world she never wanted me to know, letting me grow up in the light of all her hopes,” writes Alice. “Giving me an ordinary life.”

“Alice’s felicitous prose flows flawlessly, drawing the reader in with each compelling chapter.”