Angels on the Clothesline

A Memoir

By: Ani Tuzman

Narrated by: Ani Tuzman

Length: 6 hrs and 33 mins

Publisher's summary

The weight of grief, fear, and bigotry.
The imprint of trauma.
The inner wonder and light that no measure of darkness can extinguish.

The daughter of Holocaust survivors and recent immigrants, Ani Tuzman grows up in a world darkened not only by her parents’ unfathomable grief and rage, but also by the bewildering bigotry of her American neighbors, schoolmates, and teachers. Yet on the farm that is her home, Ani can’t help but find beauty and joy.

Ani doesn’t tell her parents that every day on the school bus her hair is searched for her Jew-Devil horns. She also doesn’t dare talk about the ecstasy of spinning in a meadow, the solace of writing to an unseen companion, or about any of the other secret sorrows and joys she believes that she has no right to feel.

In her memoir, Angels on the Clothesline, Ani, the woman, bridges time to be the presence missing from her childhood. What opens up is an intimate account of vulnerability, creativity, and irrepressible resilience. We walk in young Ani’s shoes, see through her eyes, and witness, despite the burden of trauma, a child’s innate wonder that will not be extinguished and ultimately protects her.

Written in compelling vignettes, Angels on the Clothesline arouses awe for the human spirit—revealing how easily we can wound and be wounded and, through all this, choose to love. Told with tender and unflinching immediacy, Ani’s story is an invitation to embrace ourselves and each other with the compassion that can free us.

©2023 Ani Tuzman (P)2023 Ani Tuzman

Let Us Now Praise This Audiobook!

It’s rare that I ever feel fortunate to have macular degeneration, which keeps me from reading book-size print, and to have multiple sclerosis that weakens me so I can’t hold a book, but now I am extremely thankful I needed to listen to Angels on the Clothesline from an audiobook and to hear it read by the author herself. Through that medium, I heard Ani’s words in her own voice, expressing her longing as the child Ani tries to makes sense of the cruel behavior directed towards her. Why can’t her mother, who lost so many loved ones in the Holocaust, show love instead of making belittling remarks every time she comes close? Why does her teacher feel the need every single day to exclaim and encourage her students to repeat, “Pee-yew! What does the little Jew have in her lunchbox today?” When she read those words aloud, Ani’s inflection and rhythm of speech conveyed her feelings to me then and throughout the book in a deeper way than I think reading the book would have reached me.
Although Ani and I are close in age, our backgrounds could not be more dissimilar. I grew up in a tiny midwestern town and had never met a Jew until I was in high school when I attended a church conference where a rabbi led sing-alongs with his guitar. Even now that I have come a long ways in knowing what it is like to be a Jew because I had a Jewish husband for 43 years as well as having many Jewish relatives and friends, I still can never get over how an educated elementary school teacher, not only ignorant little kids, could be so mean to a defenseless child because she was Jewish.
Ani writes powerfully about childhood moments that are huge in a small person’s life. When Ani, scared to death, knocks on the door of a Christian classmate who has been nice to her, and the mother who comes to the door is kind, I cried when I heard that passage, and I cry as I write about it now. I hope that would’ve been my mother and me, but can I be certain? I suspect that each person who experiences this book, no matter what their background, will find their own childhood memories moving to the forefront alongside Ani’s.
For those who think the Holocaust is only in the past, Ani’s book is compelling evidence that the Holocaust continues to affect the descendants of survivors. Although hers is a unique story, it is connected to those stories playing out every day in the lives of our new immigrant families with their own little ones.
Some of Ani’s experiences as a child transcend the everyday in remarkable ways that readers will discover and take with them far beyond the end of this book.