The Net of Dreams

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY 4 MAR 1996

The author's father, Alexander (Sanyi) Salamon, a Carpathian Czech doctor, was incarcerated in Dachau and survived, but he lost his first wife and their small daughter in the Holocaust. In 1946, Alexander married the author's mother, Lilly (Szimi), a Czech Jew who had survived Auschwitz, where both her parents perished. Julie Salamon (White Lies) begins this poignant family album with an account of the 1993 trip she made with her mother and stepfather to Poland, to the movie set where Steven Spielberg was filming Schindler's List. She interviews Spielberg, tours the concentration camps and tape-records her mother's memories of Nazi doctor Josef Mengele. The author's parents moved to New York in 1947, then in 1953 to an Appalachian Ohio village, where she was born and grew up. Her father died of cancer when she was 18. Beneath her girlhood's ``Norman Rockwell trappings'' lay the tragic past her parents hid from her, a past she painstakingly reconstructs in this deeply affecting memoir. Photos not seen by PW.