INTRODUCTION
This is not your usual Holocaust book.
This is not even a Holocaust book; but without the Holocaust, it does not exist.
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I gave birth to actual human beings twice in my life, and neither go-around compares to the gestation period of this book. Not even close. I’m certain, to the core of my soul, that this book needing to be born has affected my mental, emotional and physical state in all sorts of ways for several decades.
I don’t think I have told this story perfectly. But now I have told it. I’m sure I have missed key points, but most of it is here. I also know that if I didn’t get all of it out there and be done with being “in the process” of writing a book, that I
may very well burst, all of my story going into bits with the rest of me.
The idea for this book was born in 1994, when I quit my shiny-new Manhattan ad agency job to travel to Eastern Europe with my mom and my grandmother. It first lived in a cute, little journal a good friend gifted me prior to the trip. (Thanks, Stu. I told you I’d give you props here!) It then went into hibernation until 1997 when I was a student at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. I’d heard about the semi-famous “Sam Freedman Book Seminar, ” and I wanted in. After some vigorous back-and-forth with Professor Freedman on why this book carried with it a compelling enough idea to at least get me into this seminar, he opened the gates and I was in.
