Where She Came From: A Daughter's Search for Her Mother's History - Softcover

Along with millions of lives, the Holocaust stripped away the official records and family mementos that anchor personal histories. In 1989, after both the opening of Czechoslovakia to the outside world and the death of her mother Frances, a concentration-camp survivor, journalist Helen Epstein made her first tentative efforts to uncover her own history. Armed only with a 12-page letter written by her mother, she retraced family footsteps from the provincial town of Brtnice to Vienna, where her great-grandmother Josephine had killed herself in despair. In Prague, her spirited grandmother Pepi, who had been orphaned at age 8 and left in poverty, rose from those ashes to run a fashionable dressmaking salon. Pepi married a man who repudiated Judaism so completely that their daughter Frances learned of her background only as the Nazis rose to power. Epstein's meticulous research beautifully conjures the drama of their lives and times, carving out the surrounding culture until these three women stand against it in stark relief.

Helen Epstein is the author of six books of literary non-fiction including the two memoirs Children of the Holocaust and Where She Came From: A Daughter's Search for her Mother's History and the biography Joe Papp: An American Life. All three books were named New York Times Notable Books of the Year. She is also the translator from the Czech of Acting in Terezin by Vlasta Schonova and the late Heda Margolius Kovaly's classic memoir Under A Cruel Star: A LIfe in Prague 1941-1968. She and her husband are the founders of Plunkett Lake Press Born in Prague in 1947, Helen grew up in New York City, where she attended and graduated from Hunter College High School (1965). She became a journalist after the Soviet Invasion of Czechoslovakia of 1968 when her personal account was published in the Jerusalem Post. In 1971, Helen graduated from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and began freelancing for diverse publications including the New York Times where her first Magazine cover story on freelance musician Ed Birdwell ran in 1974. Her profiles of legendary musicians such as Vladimir Horowitz, Leonard Bernstein and Yo-Yo Ma are collected in Music Talks. She began teaching journalism at New York University in 1974 and became the first woman in the journalism department to be awarded tenure. In 1986, she left NYU to move to the Boston area. She has an active speaking career and has lectured at a wide variety of venues including universities in Europe and North and South America; health organisations; high schools; synagogues, libraries and churches; the United States Military Academy at West Point; the Embassy of the Czech Republic and the U.S. Holocaust Museum. The mother of two grown sons, Helen shuttles between the Berkshires and the Boston area with her husband and blogs about the arts for the New England cultural website The Arts Fuse.