With layers of intrigue and deep background of the Nazi 1930s on through WWII, Jo Sorochinsky reveals the poignant reality of her father’s hidden past and her own heritage in Dancing With My Father. The title evokes the delicate process that Jo focuses on to coax her father to reveal his past to her. It was this dance with him over many years that helped him come to terms with the horrors of what had happened to his family, his friends, and himself. Jo’s father, Ansel Horwitz, spent his early life up to his late teens in Vienna. He was a baptized Catholic because his parents had converted from Judaism to Catholicism. Many Viennese Jews had done the same, thinking it would protect them from the growing Nazi threat when they took control in 1938. But the Nazi rule stated that if you had Jewish grandparents, you were a Jew. So Ansel Horowitz became a young refugee from Nazi-controlled Austria as his parents arranged a move to Ireland through connections in the Catholic Church. His father, believing in his Austrian traditions of honor, refused to leave and his mother stayed with him. They were swept up and killed in the early Holocaust. For young Ansel, called Ans, it was supposed to be a two-week layover before going on to the United States. But weeks turned into years. During that time he found a trade and a girl, building a life and a family with Noreen. The United States closed itself to more Jewish immigration, and the family finally moved to Canada and established a new life. Jo grew up believing herself to be an Irish Catholic girl who migrated to Canada with her parents. As time passed, she began to sense that something was amiss in the family lore. Based on hints, anomalies, and intuition, her curiosity about her own roots grew and she became interested in her father's early life. Her Irish mother fended off her growing inquiries, saying that it was not her story to tell. And her father stonewalled her at every turn. But Jo grew stronger in the belief that her father’s story was also her story, her heritage, and she pressed on. Jo relates the journey of patiently coaxing her father, getting him to give her peeks into his past. Slowly, the twists and turns of events and the vivid scenes of the horror and cruelty that was Austria under Hitler resurfaced. Dancing With My Father is masterfully written by Jo Sorochinsky as she allows us to join her journey to learn the long-kept secrets of her father’s experiences. It will keep you reading long after the intensity has exhausted you. While reviewing, I harkened to my own writing of the stories of my immigrant family wrapped up in the intrigues of early immigrations to what became America. But when the family history carries the weight of the mayhem, chaos, suffering, and death that the Nazi regime imposed on an entire society and her family, Jo moves the mission to an entirely different level. Jo relates her complex research and findings to us while revealing deep abiding respect and love for her father. She mixes gentleness with tenacity and grace with tender aggressiveness as she lays bare the experiences that had haunted her father all his life. Jo’s story peels back the layers of history with skill and depth. In multi-layered, skillfully researched reporting, she builds the history of her father and his family while also building the history of the Jews in Austria and Austria itself as it sank into Nazi control. Jo Sorochinsky delivers the shocking facts and the deep feelings of one man’s story that reflects the story of a generation with the highest skill and sensitivity. Dancing With My Father is well worth your reading and reflecting on her message.

Dancing with My Father is a fascinating insight into a life shaped by the Holocaust, marked by silence but also by the love which Viennese teenager, Anselm Horwitz, found in his solitary exile in Ireland. His parents, unable to leave Austria, were murdered. The writing of this book has been a personal quest by his daughter to bring together the story that has remained hidden for so long, vividly told and showing the ongoing reverberations of the trauma and legacy in the next generations. A most captivating read. Gisela Holfter, author of An Irish Sanctuary: German-speaking Refugees in Ireland, 1933 - 1945 This beautifully-written book draws us into a world of family intimacies and the tension between the known and the hidden, of identities discarded and lives remade. The grim histories of the twentieth century, sprawling from Europe to Ireland to Canada, are exceptionally rendered through the powerful story of one patriarch’s capacity to survive. It is part history, part love story, part passionate determination to understand; wholly compelling.

Dancing with My Father is not only an important record of the Holocaust’s horrors but is a thought-provoking exploration of heritage and how identity is formed. It is also a loving testament to individuals whose stories should not be forgotten.

Dancing with My Father is a personal and raw real-life story of self-discovery told through the lens of a challenging and convoluted past. Without apology, it indirectly snares the reader to embark upon a similar reflective and insightful journey – but only if one has the courage to do so, for it requires plenty of courage. It is not simply – and only – a story about the intrigues of a particular family history but delves more importantly into the history of how nations, communities and individuals have come to terms – or refused to do so – with the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis through the Holocaust. Dancing with My Father is the story of a life quest to understand one’s place in the world, in life and in true love, and as such is a triumph of bare passion and authenticity.

This is a powerful story that captures vast historical forces within the workings of a single family. The broad sweep of the narrative traces the author’s father’s movements across the globe from Nazi occupied Vienna to small town Ontario. It portrays the unimaginable terror of being forced to leave one’s home and family at the age of seventeen and the courage and determination that was summoned to restart and rebuild a new life in a strange country, alone and afraid. It depicts a painful inheritance of family secrets and disconnection, as well as the powerful bonds of love that can hold a family together. At its heart it is a carefully researched and beautifully written account of one woman’s journey to unravel the deep silences surrounding her own identity and to claim her place in the family and in the world.

In Dancing with My Father, Jo Sorochinsky tells a compelling account of what it meant for her father to be raised Catholic in Vienna, only to find as a teenager that he was nonetheless a target of Nazi extermination because his parents had converted from Judaism. It recounts the way in which her family travelled through secrets and lies, all couched in the silence of deep suffering. It lays bare the trauma of experiencing anti-Semitism in its most violent form, a trauma that does not let up with age. Sorochinsky, who emigrated from Ireland to Canada at the age of seven and was raised Roman Catholic, brings us along with her as she confronts the truth, and the significant impact that not knowing had on her childhood and adulthood. It is a rich and important story, one carefully researched, that captures the horror of the Holocaust and its wrenching mark on those who experienced it directly, as well as on the generation that followed. At the same time, it is a layered story of persistence, love and ultimately, a family’s reconciliation with its past.

The Holocaust did not end in 1945. What happened accompanied survivors and their descendants throughout their lives. Dancing with my Father is the touching story of how a father and daughter came to terms with it. Parents determine the family memory for decades. But children instinctively feel that there are gaps in their memory which are crucial for understanding their own identity. Parent-child relationships often have more the character of boxing matches, with verbal attacks and causing deep injuries. Dancing with my Father points out more the careful, cautious, respectful relationship. It also shows that “truth” is not immediately accessible, that you have to circle around it, look at it from all sides and after years finally get closer to it and each other.