Diane Botnick is thrilled to be debuting her novel,
Becoming Sarah
Coming
October 28, 2025
Can you call yourself a Survivor if you don't know what you survived?
Take Sarah Vogel. Auschwitz is her hometown, yet she has no memory of the place. Not the obscene conditions of her birth, the mother, or the changing cast of faceless women who kept her warm on winter nights. She’s only three when liberated, and with no one to tell her who she is or what she might become, Sarah invents herself. On her journey from Europe, land of the defeated, to America, land of the self-invented, she learns that holes in a person’s past are red flags and that little white lies go down easier than explanations. But eventually those lies will become the wall that hides her true self, the good parts and bad, from those she loves.
"Lyrically and meticulously composed....Not a traditional Holocaust story, Botnick’s narrative examines the effects of the detritus left behind by the great atrocity on those who survived as well as their offspring....Painful, dramatic, and ultimately triumphant." —KIRKUS REVIEWS
Part holocaust memorial, part sci-fi, both spiritual and cynical, Becoming Sarah is a powerful exploration of a question that, horrifically, has become too common in the modern world: how does a survivor of unspeakable acts survive? And what happens to the children they raise, whose childhoods are marked by cauterized emotions (how else to get through each day of a place like Auschwitz than by refusing to feel?) Diane Botnick bravely and successfully takes on these questions with great skill, tracing the arc of a family who struggle to pay the price for their matriarch’s beginnings in a death camp. And all this is done in a style that is witty, downright funny at times, wonderfully hopeful. Becoming Sarah offers a brilliant quartet of unforgettable women who each crave a love that has been stifled but never destroyed.
— GLORIA JACOBS, former executive director of the Feminist Press and executive editor of Ms. Magazine
A multigenerational saga born in Auschwitz, Becoming Sarah opens with a gut punch crafted so beautifully, it feels almost divine. Botnick masterfully weaves the “bundle of loose threads, each with its own beginning” as she carries the reader through decades and deep inside a world of survivors and strivers, of existentialists and cynics, sinners and saints. Full, fresh, and often startlingly funny, every page of this novel offers a new way of looking at the world, and just in time.
— AMY FRIEDMAN, author of Desperado’s Wife
Becoming Sarah by Diane Botnick is a sweeping generational saga, told in oblique yet powerful prose. From Sarah's birth in Auschwitz through many generations of daughters stretching into the future, Botnick shows us the slowly uncoiling effects of motherlessness, persecution, and displacement and how love weaves, struggles, and sometimes triumphs through it all.
— HELEN BENEDICT, author of The Good Deed and Wolf Season
A prism-like gaze at the jewel of motherhood, with its sharp edges and smooth opaque surfaces, Becoming Sarah keeps churning through several generations of Jewish women, who strive to understand each other and themselves beneath the shadows of the Holocaust. Every sentence is meticulously written and not a word wasted.
— SUZZY ROCHE, singer with The Roches and author of The Town Crazy
Diane Botnick’s Becoming Sarah is the rare book I finished and wanted to immediately start reading all over again. Lush with figurative language, but spare in mood, this finely written novel mines the depths of an identity forged in deprivation but redeemed through resilience, love, and the lessons of loss. An impressive debut!
—BARBARA STARK-NEMON, author of Even in Darkness and Hard Cider