Reviews for The Watchmaker's Daughter

"Sonia Taitz has a good heart and an unmortgaged soul. Follow where she leads. You want to go there."
—John Patrick Shanley, Pulitzer, Tony, and Oscar-winning author of Moonstruck and Doubt

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“An invigorating memoir…especially noteworthy for its essential optimism and accomplished turns of phrase.”
— Kirkus Reviews

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“A heartbreaking memoir of healing power and redeeming devotion, Sonia Taitz’s The Watchmaker’s Daughter has the dovish beauty and levitating spirit of a psalm. The suffering and endurance of Taitz’s parents—Holocaust “death camp graduates” who met at the Lithuanian Jewish Survivors’ Ball in a New York hotel (imagine Steven Spielberg photographing that dance-floor tableau)—form the shadowhung backdrop of a childhood in a high-octane, postwar America where history seems weightless and tragedy a foreign import, a Hollywood paradise of perky blondes, Pepsodent smiles, and innocent high-school hijinks where our author and heroine longs to fit in. Although the wonder years that Taitz scrupulously, tenderly, beautifully, often comically renders aren’t that far removed from us, they and the Washington Heights she grew up in, the shop where her father repaired watches like a physician tending to the sick tick of time itself, the grand movie houses where the image of Doris Day sunshined the giant screen, have acquired the ache and poignance of a lost, Kodachrome age. A past is here reborn and tenderly restored with the love and absorption of a daughter with a final duty to perform a last act of fidelity.”
—James Wolcott, Vanity Fair columnist and author of Lucking Out

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“In the King's Arms is a deeply felt, lyrical novel, at once romantic and mournful, that brings to life the long tentacles of the Holocaust through the generations. In Lily Taub, Sonia Taitz has created an unforgettable, believable and sympathetic character—the young girl in all of us. The author's finely wrought observations about class structure in England, the vagaries of first love and the overriding possibility of redemption will stay with the reader long after finishing this book.”
—Emily Listfield, author of Best Intentions and Waiting to Surface

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“Heartwrenching, moving, and yes, hilarious, Taitz’s extraordinary memoir explores culture clash, Jewish roots, and the struggle to break the bonds of the past and forge your own kind of Promised Land future. But it is also an astonishing love letter to Taitz’s Holocaust survivor parents, one that’s so fiercely tender and gorgeously written that each page seems like a revelation.”
—Caroline Leavitt, critic, New York Times-bestselling author of Pictures of You

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“Sonia Taitz’s memoir of growing up the daughter of a master
watch repairman who survived the Holocaust is also a haunting meditation on time itself. Taitz writes with a painter’s eye and a poet’s voice.”
—Mark Whitaker, Editor, CNN, and author of My Long Trip Home

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“Sonia Taitz’s memoir of coming of age in postwar America is unusually gentle, loving, and insightful. This book’s understanding of family dynamics and the realities of the American Dream will resonate with us all.”
—Joshua Halberstam, author of A Seat at the Table

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“ Sonia Taitz captures time in this deeply moving memoir of a woman’s journey back to herself. The Watchmaker’s Daughter is written with a wise eye and a generous heart. Unforgettable!”
—Christina Haag, author of Come to the Edge