Eva and Eve

A Search for My Mother's Lost Childhood and What a War Left Behind

By: Julie Metz

Narrated by: Rebecca Lowman

In this unforgettable and “essential feminist memoir of women’s lives” (Sarah Wildman, author of Paper Love) the author of the New York Times bestselling memoir Perfection unearths her mother’s hidden past in in Nazi-occupied Austria.

To Julie Metz, her mother, Eve, was the quintessential New Yorker. Eve rarely spoke about her childhood and it was difficult to imagine her living anywhere else except Manhattan, where she could be found attending Carnegie Hall and the Metropolitan Opera or inspecting a round of French triple crème at Zabar’s.

After her mother passed, Julie discovered a keepsake book filled with farewell notes from friends and relatives addressed to a ten-year-old girl named Eva. This long-hidden memento was the first clue to the secret pain that Julie’s mother had carried as a refugee and immigrant from Nazi-occupied Vienna, shining a light on “a story of political repression, terror, and dissolution...full of astonishing and unlikely twists of fate showing again that individual destiny may be the greatest mystery of all” (Dani Shapiro, author of Inheritance).

“A gripping and intimate wartime account with piercing contemporary relevance” (Kirkus Reviews), Eva and Eve lyrically traces one woman’s search for her mother’s lost childhood while revealing the resilience of our forebears and the sacrifices that ordinary people are called to make during history’s darkest hours.

Excellent, moving narration

A wonderful book that echoes closely the experience of my own mother's family. Based on personal memories, interviews, and archival and bibliographical research, as well as imaginative recreation, it narrates Metz's journey of rediscovery of her mother's family's trajectory as Jews in Nazi occupied Vienna and as immigrants in New York. The structure skillfully combines first person narration with the voices found in testimonies and documents, and third person narratives that recreate the lives of the protagonists and their social, political, and personal context. A compelling, fascinating, and thought-provoking read.