The Forbidden Daughter

April 8, 2024
Jakob debuts with a poignant biography of her friend Elida Friedman, a Holocaust survivor who was “born in fire and died by fire.” Elida’s birth in 1943 was illegal, Jakob explains; the Nazis had strictly forbidden childbirth in the Jewish ghetto of Kovno, Lithuania, but her parents—Jonah, a doctor, and his wife Tzila, a nurse—delivered their baby in secret. They gave her a Hebrew name meaning “nonbirth” and smuggled her to a Christian Lithuanian family who owed Jonah a debt of gratitude for having saved one of their lives during an operation. The ghetto was liquidated shortly afterward, and Jonah and Tzila were murdered. Following the war, Elida was adopted by a Jewish couple, the Ruhins; when she learned the true story of her birth, she struggled emotionally in her new home, becoming an angry, difficult child. Elida and the Ruhins eventually relocated to Israel, where Elida reconnected with her father’s relatives; as a teenager, she was adopted by her father’s cousin. She later married and started her own family, before dying tragically young, at the age of 31, when the flight she and her husband were taking from Israel to the U.S. was bombed by Libyan-backed terrorists. In her novelistic and psychologically probing portrayal, Jakob captures how the aftereffects of trauma made Elida a tempestuous figure in the lives of those around her. It’s a captivating character study of survival and resilience.