The Rescue of Memory (1997)

Cheryl Pearl Sucher's novel, published by Scribner in 1997, is narrated by Rachel Wallfisch, the New York daughter of Holocaust survivors, whose father keeps photographs and film reels of the liberation and its group weddings in his bedroom closet and whose mother, Luba, died of an illness contracted in the camps. Rachel, who works in film, is about to marry Girard Stone. (Open Library)

Watches

Rolex watch: At her father's house, after the news about her aunt Tsenyeh, Rachel's fiancé Girard checks the time on the Rolex her father gave him when they announced their engagement. Every member of her family owns the identical watch, which she calls an oystershell perpetual timepiece, and she jokes that after a nuclear holocaust they could find one another by the glow of the dials. Her phrase plays on the Oyster Perpetual wording of Rolex dials and does not fix a model.

Source text: Then he checked the time on the Rolex wristwatch that my father had given to him after we announced our engagement. (Cheryl Pearl Sucher, The Rescue of Memory, scan cataloged as Scribner, 1997, p. 68; Internet Archive scan OCR)

Rolex watch: In the proofs of Rachel's wedding photographs, kept in a box on the hat shelf of his closet, her father looks more at ease than anyone, coiffed and manicured and wearing a diamond-and-gold Rolex identical to the one the narration here calls his wedding present to Girard; p. 68 dates that gift to the engagement. The maker is named; the model is not.

Source text: Elegantly coiffed and manicured, he sports a diamond-and-gold Rolex wristwatch identical to the one he conferred upon Girard as a wedding present. (Cheryl Pearl Sucher, The Rescue of Memory, scan cataloged as Scribner, 1997, p. 276; Internet Archive scan OCR)