How Trauma Blurs Our Vision: Book signing at Brookline Booksmith

Brookline author Anna Ornstein, My Mother's Eyes: Holocaust Memories of a Young Girl, and Phyllis M Skoy, Myopia, who grew up in New Bedford, Mass., come together in a rarefied literary moment that explores how we craft a new, triumphant life from the aftermath of trauma. Both authors are psychoanalysts.Both books are available from IP Books in New York City.In My Mother's Eyes, Auschwitz survivor Ornstein gives us a collection of stories she read to her children over many years of Passover seders. Ornstein recently gave an interview to The Boston Globe in 2016 ("From Budapest to Brookline: Psychoanalyst Looks Back").This is Skoy's Boston debut of Myopia, a memoir, in which she explores how trauma blurs our vision.Told through the life of Skoy's ophthalmologist father, who fled the Russian pogroms, Myopia asks whether we can ever really know another person.
My Mother’s Eyes: Holocaust Memories of a Young Girl
Anna Ornstein is a Holocaust survivor. After emigrating to the U.S., she seldom spoke of the experiences she suffered while a young girl. Twenty-five years ago, at the family Seder gathering, her family asked for a story from her past. In an evocative, understated passage, she shared a bit of the tragedy she saw through the eyes of a child. Every year she has added to this tradition by sharing another chapter of the tragedies she witnessed and the small moments of grace in her survival. Through her family's support, Orenstein gained enough strength to share her experiences in My Mother's Eyes, in hopes of keeping the nightmare from ever happening again.
Myopia, a memoir
The year is 1949. Jeannette sits on the edge of her hospital bed dressed and ready to go home with her newborn baby. She collapses onto the floor. Her brain is bleeding. Jeannette's husband, Nathan, is in the army, a brand new ophthalmologist. Their eight-year-old daughter lies in the hospital with a burst appendix.The year is 1905. Nathan is born into a shtetl in Bershad, Russia. He doesn't know he will come into life during the worst Jewish pogroms in Russia's history, a bleak world filled with fear of starvation and death from hatred.The time is the Great Depression. Jeannette and Nathan meet and marry in Philadelphia. He is from poverty and she is from wealth. He is a struggling student and she has graduated from the University of Pennsylvania at the top of her class in mathematics. The marriage takes place without her family's approval.I am the baby born in 1949. I will come into this world of past and present, of horses hooves and bleeding brains and burst appendix. How do love and laughter flourish and grow in this endangered garden? How is intergenerational fear transmitted and survived? What does trauma do to blur our vision? This is Myopia, a memoir, a few of the tales I can tell from my life.