Imprint

Imprint is a profound and courageous exploration of trauma, family, and the importance of breaking silence and telling stories. This book is a fresh and startling combination of history and personal revelation. 

When her son almost died at birth and her grandmother passed away, something inside of Claire Sicherman snapped. Her body, which had always felt weighed down by unknown hurt, suddenly suffered from chronic health conditions, and her heart felt cleaved in two. Her grief was so large it seemed to encompass more than her own lifetime, and she became determined to find out why. 

Sicherman grew up reading Anne Frank and watching Schindler’s List with almost no knowledge of the Holocaust’s impact on her specific family. Though most of her ancestors were murdered in the Holocaust, Sicherman’s grandparents didn’t talk about their trauma and her mother grew up in Communist Czechoslovakia completely unaware she was even Jewish. Now a mother herself, Sicherman uses vignettes, epistolary style, and other unconventional forms to explore the intergenerational transmission of trauma, about the fact that genes can be altered and carry memories, which are then passed down—a genetic imprinting. 

With astounding grace and strength, Sicherman weaves together a story that not only honours her ancestors but offers the truth to the next generation and her now nine-year-old son. A testimony of the connections between mind and body, the past and the present, Imprint is devastatingly beautiful—ultimately a story of love and survival. 

Claire Sicherman

Claire Sicherman is a graduate of The Humber School for Writers and Langara College. She has a Bachelor of Arts in Classical, Near Eastern and Religious Studies from UBC. She is a facilitator in a multi-generational writing group called Home Words Project. She has participated in a Corporeal Writing workshop with Lidia Yuknavitch and in Writing & The Body with Jennifer Pastiloff and Lidia Yuknavitch. She lives with her husband and son on Salt Spring Island, British Columbia, lovingly known as The Rock in the Middle of the Salish Sea.