March 17, 2005 • Page Image 45
…Mother's Sabbath Days, Chaim Grade's memoir of growing up in Vilna in the years before World War II, and it quickly became her all-time favorite book. "My first thought was I wanted to go to this Vilna," O'Brien says. "My second thought was, 'It doesn't exist anymore.' It was obliterated." In some ways, Yiddish literature reminded O'Brien of the Irish literature she had grown up with, something in which she remains interested. She recently wro...…

















































