The Tiger in the Attic

Starred review from October 1, 2005
In 1939, Milton was one of thousands of Jewish children who escaped from Nazi Germany on the" Kindertransport". Although her mother had obtained a visa to the United States, Milton and her older sister were unable to join her until after the war, and this memoir focuses on the more than six years that Milton spent as the foster child of a Christian English family. Although Milton's story proceeds in a generally linear fashion, she makes numerous digressions. For example, in her discussions about her father, who died prior to her departure from Germany, Milton makes reference to an older half brother, whom she finally meets years later in Tel Aviv. While her narrative includes the familiar references to wartime shortages and the fear of aerial assault, at its center is her realization that memory has an elastic quality; images of her past both fade and become more vivid as she grows older. Some of the most poignant moments involve her difficulty in emotionally reconnecting with her mother after six years of separation and her ambiguous relationship with her Jewish heritage. Recommended for all libraries. [For an interview with Milton, see "Fall Editors' Picks," "LJ "9/1/05. -Ed.] -Frederic Krome, Jacob Rader Marcus Ctr. of the American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati

Copyright 2005 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 15, 2005
Unlike most accounts of the Kindertransport, the underground railroad-like venture that saved about 10,000 Jewish children from the Holocaust and found homes for them in England, this memoir is not about the trauma left behind or the wrenching family separation. Milton's focus is on her childhood experience of arriving from Germany at age seven in 1939; living with a kind, upper-class Leeds family; and then, after the war, being forced to leave for New Jersey to reunite with the mother she never missed. Looking back now, she admits her nostalgia has a slightly acrid edge; in fact, she questions the validity of memory. In a moving climax, she confronts her denial about what she escaped from but, far from lachrymose self-importance, her acerbic commentary stops you short: "those who prevail with dignity don't look for meaning where there is none." The truth of each sentence brings home the happiness and the anguish of the survivor who never forgets "the extraordinary privilege of having been granted a reasonably ordinary life."(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2005, American Library Association.)