From Bohemia to the Bronx: A Daughter Looks Back examines my mother’s refugee story, an epic drama that spans the years from 1926 to 1958. It relates the account of Vera who lived through the horrors of the Nazi occupation during her teen years in Czechoslovakia (also known as Bohemia); who abandoned her family and homeland in 1948 to escape certain terrors of Soviet domination with her fiancé Oldrich; who gave birth to a daughter (me) in a Displaced Persons camp in France; and finally, after seven years of illness and uncertainty in France, who settled in America to be reunited with Oldrich. This book, a larger-than-life epic, delves into a family’s losses and grief, and eventual relief from insecurity.
Octavia Taylor tayloroctavia@gmail.com