Click Here To Purchase Nine Lives of a Marriage - A Curious Journey

Authors: Eva Friedlander with Mickey Goodman

Publisher: EDF Publishing

ISBN: 978-1-61005-008-1

Nine Lives is an engaging, straight-forward and easy read. After surviving  the Holocaust in Hungary, Eva Dukes Friedlander encounters the excitement of an intense romance, enjoys some years in Italy and then endures the pain of a mostly unhappy marriage in the United States.

The story spans several decades and after a brief opening part that details how she and her mother manage to evade the Nazis and Arrow Cross in Budapest, the book quickly becomes the story of her 55 year marriage to a charming narcissist who seduces her, takes  her  from Hungary to Italy to the United States after the war, eventually marries her, cheats on her and is sometimes abusive to her, both psychologically and physically.

One wonders why she remains in this marriage especially when the opportunity to reunite with her first love and fiancée arises 24 years after she leaves him for Friedlander. In fact she raises this question repeatedly within the book and the answer is always the children. Her own father had left her mother for another woman and, remembering the difficulties she and her mother experienced, she resolves not to break up her own family for what she considers selfish reasons, even though her own daughter urges her to divorce him. Ultimately her reward for her fidelity to an abusive and unfaithful husband is rewarded by the happy and fulfilling lives of her children who both appear to enjoy happy marriages, excellent careers and are able to provide good lives for the grandchildren they’ve given Eva.

It is quite possible that these happy results might not have occurred had she decided to leave their father.  In the meantime, Eva is an art lover who managed to turn her love into a lucrative career as an art and antiques dealer, as well as an appraiser and decorator.  While her husband, who was clearly quite brilliant,  struggled with missed opportunities and those ubiquitous “should haves” and “could haves”, Eva moved forward with her own entrepreneurial enterprises. Her successes in the world of business, as a mother and a grandmother must surely have compensated her for what she missed in her marriage. And her memoir tells her story in a tone of cheerfulness and understanding. In the end, she did love the guy, whatever his faults