Where She Came From

Where She Came From is a memoir in the form of a quest for personal and historical understanding - a multi-generational saga with the sweep and emotional impact of a novel. After the death of her mother, Frances, in 1989, Helen Epstein set out to research and reconstruct the life of her mother and that of her grandmother and great-grandmother. Like so many children of Holocaust survivors and other people displaced by the catastrophes of the twentieth century, she had few family documents, only stories. She traveled to Czechoslovakia, Austria, and Israel, searching out people who had known her family and locating material in libraries and archives on three continents. Using three decades of journalistic training, and working like an archaeologist with shards of data, she pieced together an account of the lives of the women in her family and the social history of Central European Jews.

First sentence: Whenever a telephone rings late at night or at an odd time of day, I still - even now that Frances has been dead for almost a decade - think someone is calling to say that my mother has taken her life.

Year

1997

Language

English

Publisher

Plume

Editions

3

Pages

322

ISBN

9780452280182

Data source: Wikidata