Searching for Amyu Danzer

On the afternoon of February 24th, 1965, Amylu Danzer, a twenty-year-old art student who’d 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, and compellingly written memoir, the writer and photographer John Rosenthal looks back on his youthful friendship with Amylu, and, drawing on multiple sources—amongst them his own journals, the testimony of her family and some of the people with whom she studied, newspaper reports of her death, and the eyewitness account of one of the men who found her body—he seeks to answer some of the questions which have haunted him ever since he first learned of her death—questions which were either too easily dismissed or else were too easily answered at the time.

Searching for Amylu Danzer is a powerful and unillusioned book, and in writing it Rosenthal has ensured 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.