A trigger warning for readers: DARIA’S SECRETS includes content surrounding the Holocaust, child sexual abuse, suicide, anxiety/panic attacks, and murder.
Fifty years after surviving the Holocaust, Daria Abramson continues to be plagued by the horrors she experienced during her childhood. DARIA’S SECRETS follows her journey as she reluctantly begins therapy at the urging of her loved ones. Although Daria starts out her sessions defensive and keeping her feelings quiet, she soon finds that it is a safe space to unpack her experiences and their lasting impacts. Slowly, Daria begins to realize how keeping so much to herself over the years has strained her closest relationships.
This literary exploration of generational trauma pulls no punches, with the titular secrets touching on complicated themes, repressed memories, and deep feelings of guilt. Author Jeff Ingber creates a compelling protagonist in Daria, who struggles to find good in herself, even as she sees it in everyone around her. Her initial hesitation around therapy also feels realistic for a member of her generation, and Ingber does well to show her slow transformation from feeling like she needs therapy to feeling like she earned it. She deserves to have someone who can help her with the most important task left in her life: healing fractured relationships and letting her loved ones in.
The vehement therapy sessions are interwoven with Daria’s more casual day-to-day interactions, which mainly focus on her relationships with her daughter Keren, her grandchildren, and Ruth, a lifelong friend and fellow survivor. Ingber excels at creating detailed, lifelike backdrops for everyday conversations in a way that finds beauty in the mundane. Little rituals like taking weekly walks with Ruthie or getting post-tennis donuts with her granddaughter show the care Daria has taken in nurturing her relationships, giving them a strong foundation despite the strain from uncommunicated issues. While Daria’s scenes with Keren are often fraught and can explode with one wrong word, none of that tension is carried into her conversations with her grandchildren—a realistic and somewhat typical family dynamic. Even when Daria feels disconnected from the people around her, their emotions are given as much complexity and narrative weight as hers, creating a realistic and unforgettable cast.
While the characters’ emotional arcs are the main focus of DARIA’S SECRETS, Ingber also delves into the very real horrors of the Holocaust. After Nazis murdered her entire family, Daria spent her formative years in the Lodz ghetto, which was run by the controversial figure Chaim Rumkowski. There has been debate about whether Rumkowski—a Jewish person who protected some in the ghetto by selecting others to send to concentration camps—was as bad as the Nazis he worked for or just trying to do what he could in an impossible situation, and Ingber attempts to portray that complexity when describing him from the perspective of his young charges and victims.
Despite the heavy themes, DARIA’S SECRETS contains moments of casual, lighthearted humor and is an uplifting story at its core. Readers will find themselves rooting for Daria, a woman who is trying so hard to become her best self, to find the peace and happiness she seeks.
At turns tender and intense and anchored by nuanced characters and detailed settings, DARIA’S SECRETS is a reflective literary novel that explores the impacts of generational trauma and how therapy can help heal those wounds.
~Cameron Gillespie for IndieReader