What the critics have said

"A family history that is meticulously researched, rich in personal detail and an unusual resource for those seeking to build a bridge over the Holocaust between the world of pre-war European Jewry and contemporary Jewish life."

-Helen Eptsein, authour of Children of the Holocaust

"Occupying a unique place between autobiography and fiction, Journey to Vaja is a haunting evocation of a world of the past and its presence in the present. It transcends time and place, moves back through centuries, and even transcends its own particular family to talk about the trials and pains of families, of people, of generations. It is a book about a daughter's love of her father and family and her ability to explore the past in order to understand the present."

-David Staines, Department of English, University of Ottawa

"Nowhere is the moral and political potential of the memoir form so well realized as in Elaine Kalman Naves's Journey to Vaja, in which she combines her personal memories of growing up the daughter of a holocaust survivor with the actual letters of her 'shadow family,' all of whom died in the wake of the last evil effort of the Nazi regime to destroy as many Jewish families as it could in the course of its own death throes. Naves's journey through her family's letters, more than any of the many fictionalized accounts I have seen or read of the holocaust, brought home to me the terrible individual suffering, compounded over millions of lives in a host of families, that has occurred in our times."

-Helen M. Buss, Prairie Fire

"A touching story of Naves's family history from the 1780s to our times. She travels through the emotional, historical-geographical terrain of two centuries, meticulously recording events and introducing family members, acquaintances, and the milieu of Hungary's historical times."

-George Gabori, author of When Evils Were Most Free

"A personal account of a kind that one encounters but rarely, this evocative story is told in remarkable detail and with empathy combined with a reassuring degree of objectivity. It complements usefully and poignantly the still-growing scholarly literature on the history of Jews in Hungary."

Istvan Anhalt, Emeritus Professor, Music Department, Queen's University

“a dynastic tale structured like a triple-decker generational novel…, a loving tribute to a courageous family.”

Richard Teleky, The Toronto Star

“The child of Hungarian Holocaust survivors who was herself born in Hungary, Naves combines the genres of autobiography, biography, fiction [and] history to describe two centuries of her Hungarian-Jewish family’s history. Through careful research, Naves manages to bridge the Holocaust gulf to better times, so that today I am able to read … not only how Jews died, but how they lived. … She also displays a courageous honesty in revealing some of the less attractive family history, a thing people are sometimes reluctant to do when writing about victims of terrible crimes. Yet this only adds to the strength and credibility of her story. Eloquent…. Beautifully and heartrendingly written.”

Libby Scheier, The Montreal Gazette

“a remarkable portrayal of daily life in pre-war Hungary [written] with the thorough research of an academic historian and the craft of a novelist.”

Greg McGillis, Ottawa Citizen

“Journey to Vaja reminds us of the haunting words of Nobel Prize winner I.B. Singer, the Yiddish writer who said ‘I write in the language of ghosts.’ Through her meticulous research, Kalman Naves has added to our cultural memory and animated a lost world.”

Maureen Moore, Vancouver Sun

Anyone who has listened to a parent spin family yarns knows that such stories are concoctions of myth and fact. But the books that emerge from these tales – Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family, Denise Chong’s The Concubine’s Children or Michael Ignatieff’s The Russian Album – tend to favour one mode or the other.

Journey to Vaja fits the pattern: chronicling four generations of her father’s Hungarian-Jewish family, Montreal literary journalist Elaine Kalman Naves learned many of the romantic stories of Vaja, the village in Hungary where her ancestors lived, at her father Gusti’s knee.

-John Lorin, Quill and Quire.