"Written in a variety of literary forms, The Museum of Unconditional Surrender captures the shattered world of a life in exile. Some chapters are written in compact and beautiful prose fragments. Another chapter re-creates the daily journal of the narrator's lonely and alienated mother, who shops at the improvised flea-markets in town and longs for her children; another is a dreamlike narrative in which the narrator's circle of women friends are visited by an angel.

There are reflections and accounts of the Holocaust and the Yugoslav Civil War; portraits of European artists; a recipe for Caraway Soup; a moving story of a romantic encounter in Lisbon; descriptions of family photographs; memories of the small town in which the narrator was raised, in which she remembers the Gypsies living opposite the railroad tracks and the magnificent local seamstress (who "seemed to have grown into her Singer sewing machine").

The Museum addresses the themes of art and history, aging and loss."--BOOK JACKET.