Michael Hickins has written an acerbically funny and ultimately heart-wrenching Picaresque memoir in The Silk Factory: Finding Threads of My Family's True Holocaust Story. Beautifully observed details of a seemingly last-chance marriage and late-in-life fatherhood combine with a quest to right the Holocaust-era theft of a family business make for an entertaining and emotionally resonant page-turner. As we follow Hickins from America, where he has "managed the seemingly impossible... Laura, who loves me like no other, doesn't like me anymore," to Europe and a road trip accompanied by a motley group of sparring characters, he also takes us on another journey, that of transforming his own acute and self-destructive shortcomings into some chance of redemption. A wonderful, deeply illuminating book to savor.
-Alice LaPlante, New York Times bestselling author of Turn of Mind, Half Moon Bay and The Making of a Story.
The Silk Factory is a terrific read, a Holocaust book unlike any other. Hickins, a refreshingly honest memoirist, takes readers on a suspenseful journey, skillfully navigating hard questions both about Nazi crimes and his own life choices.
-Sam Apple, author of Ravenous: Otto Warburg, the Nazis, and the Search for the Cancer-Diet Connection.
By turns razor-sharp and heartbreakingly tender, Michael Hickins's memoir is an unforgettable exploration of personal and intergenerational history-the traumas we inherit, the stories we tell ourselves and our children, and the stories that are hidden, even as they shape our lives. Above all, The Silk Factory is about the courage to seek the truth.
-Dawn Raffel, author of The Strange Case of Dr. Couney and Boundless as the Sky.
What we know, what we will never know, are the tormenting and tangled concerns of children of refugees and survivors. Michael Hickins in his remarkable and intense memoir The Silk Factory deals complexly with fragments of his family's past as he wrestles with these questions. Yes, this is a historical journey where, with scant clues, Hickins uncovers the story of his family's factory and home stolen during the Holocaust (which still operates today) and the murder of his family members. But this is also a powerful and unflinching personal quest as Hickins bravely attempts to untangle the legacy of generational trauma, the corrosive sorrow and rage that has infected his childhood, his marriage, and his parenting.
-Victoria Redel, author of Paradise.
In this story from a Holocaust survivor's son, as he uncovers his past, as he learns about his family - learns so much that no one's ever told him - and shares with us as he learns, we learn from him, we see how that which was sundered remains broken, generation after generation. And decades later, the loss, the pain, lives on inside him too, his failed marriages, the rage that he can barely keep bottled up. But by the end of this story Hickins finds himself in a different place. As he puts it, "not forgiving yourself at all is the best way of passing the behavior down to future generations. I may be inexcusable, but I have to forgive myself for the sake of my children."
-Michael Gottlieb, author of Mostly Clearing and The Voices, and a founding member of the Language poetry school.
