Lisa Gruenberg first started writing when her elderly father, a Viennese Holocaust survivor, began having flashbacks and nightmares about the past. She wrote in the voice of her father’s sister, Mia, who disappeared into Germany in 1941 and whose name her father would not say out loud until a year before his death. Her father always spoke about his city in the most joyous way. By the time she inquired more deeply, he was unable to reliably remember the past. After his death, she translated family letters and traveled to Vienna and Germany to explore his lost landscape. She interwove her present-day story with Mia’s and her father’s, linking them with photographs, primary-source documents, letters, her father’s writing, and the joyful tales he told her long ago. This is a Holocaust tale, but it is also very much the modern-day story of the relationship between one daughter and her father, about how trauma travels down through the generations, and about how we find meaning in our lives.
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