Bending Toward the Sun: A Mother and Daughter Memoir

A miraculous lesson in courage and recovery, BENDING TOWARD THE SUN tells the story of a unique family bond forged in the wake of brutal terror.

Weaving together the voices of three generations of women—Rita, her daughter, Leslie, and her granddaughter, Mikaela—the memoir provides powerful and inspiring evidence of the resilience of the human spirit, relevant to every culture in every corner of the world. Unimaginably devastating and incredibly uplifting, this firsthand account of survival and healing offers a poignant message of hope in our own uncertain times.

Rita Lurie was five years old when she fled her home in Poland to hide from the Nazis. From the summer of 1942 to 1944, she and fourteen members of her family shared a nearly silent existence in a cramped, dark attic, subsisting on scraps of food. Young Rita watched helplessly as her young brother and then her mother died by her side. Motherless and stateless, Rita and her surviving family spent the next five years wandering throughout Europe, waiting for a country to accept them.

Decades later, Rita is the matriarch of a close-knit family in California. Yet in addition to love, Rita unknowingly passes to her children feelings of fear, apprehension, and guilt. Her daughter Leslie, an accomplished lawyer, media executive, and philanthropist began probing her mother's childhood to discover how Rita's pain has affected not only Leslie's life and outlook but also that of her children. Their collaboration produced this unforgettable story, which reveals how deeply the Holocaust remains in the hearts and minds of survivors and their descendants.