I Remember Rudy

by Cora Schwartz

What others are saying:

CORA SCHWARTZ is a true wordsmith and storyteller who weaves this memoir through time and space to perfection.

Rudy is a bigger-than-life immigrant, who was pulled from his home at nine years of age to the Nazi labor camps where he suffered for three years. Barely literate, still living by his wits, often on the fringes of the law, he comforts himself and his inner demons with gambling and booze.

Cora is a gifted writer, educated, feisty and independent, and from another world. They are both recently divorced, in the middle of life, both hurting and in need.

This is their story, written in the first person. Two lonely strangers, motivated by instant love and sensual passion, fighting and defensive, learning and sharing. Driven by the insecure need of each of them to know more about the other, the more they open up and share, the easier it is to tolerate and live with their differences. I loved their stories, the anecdotes of life. I couldn’t put it down and read it in one sitting.

Charles D. Leviton, EdD
Marriage and Family Therapist
Retired College Professor
Co-Author with his wife Patti of
The Conflict Between Us Is the Conflict Within Me: (Phoenix Rising Press, 2000)

I Remember Rudy is a memoir, but it is an equally beautiful work of imagination. It tells the story of a Holocaust survivor after "the camps," and the story of the woman who loves him, and understood and accepted his eccentric life as he wrestled with terrible memories. It is an unforgettable story and a must read.

Stephanie Kaplan Cohen, author of
In My Mother's House (Woodley Books, 2007)
and Additions and Subtractions (Plain View Press, 2010)

I just wanted to just let you know how much I loved I REMEMBER RUDY. It IS your best work yet, and you truly brought Rudy to life on the page--he is enigmatic, mesmerizing, charming, maddening, sensitive, insensitive; a truly complex, original, and amazing persona. Your bond to him is enviable, your loss very palpable, and you captured his life and yours in a remarkable love story. I was hooked by the first sentence and hung on until the last very moving chapter where I cried with you and for you.

Part of this memoir's achievement comes from your ability to seamlessly shift into different time periods and places with Rudy at the center, and how his life tethered yours wherever you were in the world. That is not easy to do, and I admired how you pulled it off in addition to the honest dialog and narrative throughout.

Sounds like a cliche, but you must believe me when I tell you I couldn't put it down.

Irene Zabetko
Producer and Director of: Life in the Dead Zone and
author of The Sky Unwashed

ISBN 978-0-9670640-6-2
Publication Date: May 1st, 2011