The Letters Project is about big history, the Holocaust, but it is
also an extraordinarily intimate personal narrative-a rare blend of
informative, poignant, excruciating, startling, humorous, and
ultimately inspiring storytelling. In 1986, when her mother died at
the age of sixty-four, Eleanor Reissa went through all of her
belongings. In the back of her mother's lingerie drawer, she found
an old leather purse. Inside that purse was a large wad of folded
papers. They were letters. Fifty-six of them. In German. Written in
1949. Letters from her father to her mother, when they were
courting. Just four years earlier, he had fought to stay alive in
Auschwitz and on the Death March while she had spent the war years
suffering in Uzbekistan. Thirty years later, Eleanor-a theatre
artist who has been on the forefront of keeping Yiddish
alive-finally had the letters translated. The particulars of those
letters send her off on an unimaginable adventure into the past,
forever changing her and anyone who reads this book. "'The
Holocaust,' Eleanor Reissa writes in this unforgettable and
courageous book, 'is attached to me like my skin and I would be
formless without it.' A very personal story that is also a
fundamental one of a woman trying to make sense of her life and
family and of the shadows that go back before she was born. There
is plenty of feeling and sentiment but it never feels sentimental.
Her inimitable wit leavens the sadder scenes. This journey of
discovery is riveting, told with tender insight, at times
heartbreaking and at times heartwarming just like the Yiddish songs
that have delighted Ms. Reissa's audiences." -Joseph Berger is a
New York Times reporter and author of Displaced Persons: Growing Up
American After the Holocaust "Among the great number of personal
takes on the Holocaust, Eleanor Reissa's book really stands out,
both for its intelligence and courage and for the unique way she
braids the inter-generational stories together. In this brutal,
poignant, and searingly honest book, Reissa simultaneously pieces
together the unfathomable story of her Holocaust survivor father,
reckons with the guilt she came to feel as his uncomprehending
American daughter, and manages somehow to find insight and purpose
in the ashes. This extraordinary account of two parallel journeys
will stick with anyone privileged enough to read it." -David
Margolick, a former reporter for The New York Times, author of
several books, including, most recently, The Promise and the Dream:
The Untold Story of Martin Luther King, Jr. And Robert F. Kennedy
"The Letters Project is a wonderful book-funny, heartbreaking, and
ultimately transcendent. Eleanor Reissa's journey back into her
family's past makes for a gripping-and very human-international
mystery. I highly recommend it." -Tony Phelan, TV Showrunner for:
Grey's Anatomy, Doubt, and Council of Dads "Eleanor Reissa has
written a gritty, fearless yet funny memoir about herself, her
family, and the Holocaust. Once I began reading it, I was
completely swept away until the journey ended. I was moved by the
power of this uniquely personal yet universal story." -Julian
Schlossberg is an American motion pictures, theatre, and television
producer
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