Joy Ramirez

by Joy Ramirez

Emily Witt sets her arresting memoir, Health and Safety: A Breakdown, in New York City from 2016 to 2021, charting her entry into the city’s techno scene with its mind-altering drugs, ecstatic music and community of people sometimes embracing, sometimes resisting a changing new world. In her book’s first section, she describes learning the “geography of nightlife,” writing gauzily about raves and parties she attends, the drugs she takes and the general euphoria that blankets her life for several months as she falls in love with a fellow raver, Andrew.

When the Trump presidency begins, we are thrust back into the waking world with her, and the story takes on much darker hues. Still, she continues to party until she can’t: COVID-19 hits the city with ferocity. Gone are the raves and the DJs and the scene itself, “and with it the illusion of health and safety.” Witt invites us to relive a tumultuous era in the country’s history through the eyes of a keen observer.

Witt, a staff writer for the New Yorker and author of the acclaimed exploration of nontraditional sex, Future Sex, relays her experiences covering watershed moments and national tragedies: the aftermath of the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, protests after the death of Breonna Taylor, and the verdict in the trial of Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd. She reflects on the country’s collective heartbreak and rage alongside her own personal losses, like her tumultuous romantic entanglement and breakup with Andrew, which throws her world into chaos. And she deftly analyzes her role as a journalist in a mad world where her work feels, at times, ineffectual.

Witt looks back at this time of experimentation with wisdom, writing that she used hallucinogens to “psychically rearrange a world I understood to be so deeply corrupted . . . that I sought a chemical window to see outside.” In the end, readers who prefer a tidy memoir that culminates in a single awakening may find Health and Safety wanting; it’s more like a spider web glistening with many realizations that branch out in connecting threads. This sharp, deeply personal work is all the better for it.

Emily Witt’s sharp, deeply personal memoir, Health and Safety, invites us to relive a tumultuous era in American history through the eyes of a keen observer.

European History, History, Nonfiction

Nonfiction History European History

Irena’s Gift

Review by Joy Ramirez

by Joy Ramirez

Karen Kirsten spent afternoons as a young child at the home of her Polish grandparents in Melbourne, Australia, eating cakes from her grandmother’s favorite patisserie and listening to classical music. Adored by her maternal grandparents Alicja and Mietek, both Holocaust survivors, she could not understand why they never spoke about their past. As a young adult, she wondered why she was taught nothing about Judaism, and she struggled to explain her mother’s tales of a troubled and abusive childhood with parents she claimed did not love her.

What Kirsten didn’t know is that when her mother, Joasia, was 32, she received a letter from a stranger that blew open her world. It was from her real father—not Mietek, but another man who was living in Canada—and he wrote that her actual mother, Alicja’s sister Irena, was fatally shot by the Nazis in occupied Poland. Joasia would soon learn that as a baby, her father smuggled her out of the Warsaw ghetto in a backpack. Alicja and Mietek, her aunt and uncle, never told her the truth. And like her aunt and uncle, Joasia kept these revelations a secret from her own children for decades.

Irena’s Gift: An Epic WWII Memoir of Sisters, Secrets, and Survival chronicles Kirsten’s remarkable, decade-long quest to understand and heal the transgenerational trauma of war on her family. Using historical accounts, interviews and extensive archival research, Kirsten movingly reconstructs scenes of violence and heroism in the lives of everyday people, most notably the extraordinary women who came before her. After years of emotionally intense research reconstructing her mother’s and grandparents’ past, Kirsten takes Joasia to Poland to uncover the origins of their pain.

Pain sometimes travels through families until someone is ready to feel it. This memoir is the result of Kirsten’s journey to break open the seal of suffering and rebuild her family’s Jewish identity after decades of silence. Irena’s Gift is a beautifully written testimony to the power of memoir to heal and recreate a family’s history.

Weaving history with mystery, Karen Kirsten uncovers her family’s traumatic experiences during the Holocaust in her remarkable memoir, Irena’s Gift.