Searching for Amylu Danzer

On the afternoon of February 24th, 1965, Amylu Danzer, a twenty-year-old art student whoid been visiting Jones Beach on Long Island, went missing. A month later, her body was swept ashore some sixteen miles away, at Far Rockaway.

In this tender, courageous, artfully structured and engagingly written memoir, the writer and photographer John Rosenthal looks back on his youthful friendship with Amylu, and, drawing on multiple sources, seeks to answer some of the questions which have haunted him ever since he first learned of her death, now half a century distant.

Pam Durban observes in her introduction that one of the great pleasures of this book–is the pleasure of traveling with the writer as he traces how the boy who knew Amylu–and the young man who lost her became the man who remembers her now. It’s the pleasure of watching something take shape that works like memory itself, tracking back and forth between now and then, picking up images and events and questions posed and unanswered by his life and Amylu’s and fitting them into the developing mosaic that I’m calling a story. It is the pleasure of watching him question and doubt, and wish he could correct his younger self.

SEARCHING FOR AMYLU DANZER is a truly affecting book–a book, as Durban says, of lingering power and grace. Not the least of its achievements is to ensure that, however short her life was, Amylu Danzer will not be counted as one of those which have no memorial–and are become as though they have never been born.