What They Saved Pieces of a Jewish Past

This is an unusual memoir and one well worth reading. Who knows - this book might encourage the reader to discover the source of his or her own mysterious life artifacts. - Naomi Kramer, Jewish Book World This marvelous memoir pinpoints the elusive phenomenon whereby memories get through to our consciousness and how they ultimately influence our lives. Capturing moments of transformation is what happens over and over in an adept memoir like What They Saved. - Judy Bolton-Fasman, Jerusalem Post [Millers book] confirms the importance of personal narrative, perhaps modernitys most recognizable voice, in framing and accepting the losses and the uncertainties of that experience. - Joanne Jacobson, Jewish Daily Forward [Miller] found a small family archive among the possessions left to her after both her parents had died. Why so few? What do they mean? Why were these ones saved? A journey about what we can find and what is lost from life to life. - Margaret Heilbrun, Library Journal [Miller] writes thoughtfully about her efforts to piece together a familys story of dislocation, success, and broken links, and of how, in the process, Miller reconnected with Jewish history and traditions. - Publishers Weekly "In this wry, original work of detective nonfiction, Miller conjures her long-missing family out of a handful of objects found in a drawer. As she tracks clues across continents and centuries, we savor the pleasures of the chase. Alix Kates Shulman, author of To Love What Is "'What They Saved' can be approached as an illuminating and instructive example of how to conduct a genealogical investigation. But it is also a rich and accomplished family chronicle, full of fascinating incidents and turbulent emotions. Above all, it is a searing work of self-exploration, artful and eloquent in the telling but heartbreaking in its candor." Jonathan Kirsch, JewishJournal.com Memoir and history relate by time and size and the questions that remain. Nancy Millers memoir, What They Saved, starts with family fragments, a sort of lost and found, with connections missing. Although it spans a period of slightly more than a hundred years, the past feels close... Nancy Miller sensitively examines her familys journey from Kishinev from a pogrom, to the US, to assimilation, and ultimately, from the Lower East Side to the Upper West Side. She explores what they saved, but between the spaces are the gaps of what has been lost. Language changes with time and we often lack the language of our forebears. Places change or disappear entirely. Jewish explorations of generations in transition are always a visit to the lost and found... What They Saved is and intimate memoir which left me with unanswered questions concerning the author and how she places herself in the more recent past of memory. - Brenda Brod, Jewish Quarterly, October 2012