I don’t think my latest book, BECAUSE OF EVA: A Jewish Genealogical Journey, would have been written if my nagging curiosity hadn’t pushed me into it. I’ve always been interested in people’s lives. For years, I’ve written personal essays and stories taken from true life experiences. Shortly before my two sons’ weddings, I began thinking about famous couples in history. Soon I was researching their courtships and marriages, and learned why FDR and Eleanor got married on St. Patrick’s Day, what Elvis sang to Priscilla as he carried her over the threshold, how George Washington met Martha, and what happened on Napoleon and Josephine’s wedding night. Ultimately, my stories were published in WEDDING DAYS: When and How Great Marriages Began.
That success gave me the confidence to write something more personal, and closer to home. My family tree had many broken branches, caused by my grandparents’ permanent separation and my parents’ divorce after that. I had always wondered about the missing people in my family, lost during the breakdown of family ties, when everyone on one “side” of the family stopped talking to everyone on the “other side.” All this made me wonder – is the need to find family greater among adults who grew up in shattered, broken homes? I think so.
Growing up, I had heard snippets of conversations about my grandfather Aaron, whom my grandmother had left before I was born. Like other unpleasant topics in my home, his story had been swept under the family rug for years. He wasn’t in any of our old family photos… but there was one picture – a half picture, actually, because one side of it had been snipped off – in which my aunt, then three years old, is holding a man’s hand. It is her father’s hand. But that – and the tip of one well-polished shoe – are all you can see of Aaron. When my grandmother left him, she saved the picture of their daughter, but she cut out Aaron, just like she cut him out of her life.
Searching to find out what happened to Aaron led me to discover “Eva,” the amazing, elderly woman who had cared for him until his death. I tracked her down in Tel Aviv, where she quickly determined that our grandfathers had been brothers and we were second cousins. At first, I found Eva just to hear about Aaron, but that would not be a big story, worthy of a book. The BIG story was Eva, and how she and her younger sister survived the Nazi occupation of Budapest in 1944. I wasn’t thinking about writing a book (yet), but meeting Eva inspired me to write articles for nationally known publications.
I wrote about topics that would appear, eventually, in BECAUSE OF EVA: forgiveness; caring for aged parents; confronting the 5th commandment to honor our parents; finding family and making peace. Writing short pieces helped me focus on the issues in my story, and forced me to ask myself, what am I really writing about here? What had Aaron done? Why did his children side with their mother and break away from him, too? What happened to the Gestapo chief who had ordered the murders of Jews in my ancestral towns? Sales of these pieces provided income for me when my book was still in the planning stages. Later on, online links to the pieces were useful examples of my work, to show publishers who were considering my query. Finally, a very good and curious editor read my entire manuscript and asked to publish my book!