Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered

Now in paperback, this European bestseller won huge -acclaim from U.S. critics, Jonathan Yardley of the Washington Post Book World declared this memoir of a Holocaust girlhood and a life reclaimed "one of the best books of 2001 . . . a book of surpassing, and at times brutal, honesty. . . . Among the many reasons that Still Alive is such an important book is its insistence that the full texture of women's existence in the Holocaust be acknowledged." Ruth Kluger's story of her years in several concentration camps, and her struggle to establish a life after the war as a refugee survivor in New York, has emerged as one of the most powerful accounts of the Holocaust. Still Alive is a memoir of the pursuit of selfhood against all odds, a fiercely bittersweet coming-of-age story in which the protagonist must learn never to rely on comforting assumptions, but always to seek her own truth. "A deeply moving and significant work . . . compared by European critics to the work of Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel."-Publishers Weekly "A stunning contemplation of human relationships, power and the creation of history. . . . A work of such nuance, intelligence and force that it leaps the bounds of genre."-Kirkus Reviews Ruth Kluger is professor emerita of German at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of five books about German literature and the recipient of Austria's National Prize for Literary Criticism. Her widely translated memoir has won eight European Literary awards. Lore Segal's writings include the novels Other People's Houses and Her First American.

Ruth Kluger was born in Vienna in 1931. In 1942, on the verge of her eleventh birthday, she was deported to the Jewish "ghetto" Theresienstadt. She would survive Auschwitz-Birkenau and the work camp Christianstadt before the war ended. After spending two years in occupied Germany, she emigrated in 1947 to the United States, where she graduated from Hunter College, earned a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, and went on to become a distinguished professor of German. Now professor emerita at the University of California, Irvine, she is the author of five volumes of German literary criticism and a frequent guest professor at the University of Gottingen. Her memoir, published in Germany in 1992 and subsequently translated into Dutch, French, Italian, Spanish, Czech, and Japanese, has won eight German literary awards and France's prestigious Prix Memoire de la Shoah. She lives in Irvine, California Lore Segal was born in Vienna in 1928. She escaped Hitler's Europe with the Kindertransport, which took her and other Jewish children to safety in Britain in 1938 Professor emerita of English at Ohio State University, she lives in New York City