Jodi Varon’s defiant exercise in honoring the lost, Your Eyes Will Be My Window reclaims the erasure of Esta Plat after her murder in Ukraine by Nazis in 1942. Seeking solace in ritual and haunted by her mother’s nine words preserving the memory of Esta Plat, Jodi Varon explores the inheritance of survivor’s guilt while unearthing the resilient beauty of friendship.
“As the author reminds us in essay after essay in this stunning collection, the past is often ‘masked, throttled, suppressed,’ but it never goes away.” —PIOTR FLORCZYK, author of From the Annals of Kraków
“[Jodi Varon’s series of connected essays is] a profound account of the author’s visits to Holocaust memorial sites in Eastern Europe and Israel, a fascinating family story of migration and tragedy embedded in the larger history of catastrophic world events...” —MELISSA KWASNY, author of Where Outside the Body Is the Soul Today
“Part heartbreaking history, part plaintive imagining, the essays in this beautifully interwoven collection detail a quest for meaning and identity in the face of violence, dislocation, and profound loss.” —KIM BARNES, author of In the Wilderness: Coming of Age in Unknown Country
Jodi Varon in conversation with historian Buzzy Jackson, at the Montana Book Festival 2023, “The Necessity and Challenge of Holocaust Narratives.”