HISTORY / HOLOCAUST STUDIES / MEMOIR

WHERE SHE CAME FROM

A Daughter's Search for Her Mother's History

After the death of her mother, Helen Epstein set 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 her 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.

“What we coldly call ‘acculturation’ is a major theme of Helen Epstein’s rich and absorbing new book, Where She Came From. In the guise of a family memoir, she brilliantly evokes Jewish life in the Czech lands…Epstein is unsparing in her examination of the trials of transplantation, and unlike many family biographers, who are in thrall to their characters, she steps out of the frame to observe herself.”
—The New York Times Book Review

“A deeply felt, yet refreshingly unsentimental memoir of an assimilating, Central European Jewish family and three generations of remarkable women. In chronicling the lives of her own ancestors, Helen Epstein gives us fascinating glimpses of a still unfamiliar world, with its complex history, its hopes, vicissitudes, and its tragic end. A richly informative, moving book.”
—Eva Hoffman

“After the death of her mother, journalist and author Epstein decided to uncover her mother’s past to learn more about her ancestors, who were victims of the Holocaust… Rich in detail, this work is told with a a strong voice, and the result is a moving account of family history and the strength of its women.”
—Library Journal

“Helen Epstein’s foremothers become our guides to the fragility and strength of the human spirit and to the ways in which our personal pasts can be rescued by attention and empathy. In Epstein’s expert and sensitive hands, truth becomes not only stranger than fiction, but more magnetic, wise and powerful.”
—Gloria Steinem

“Helen Epstein’s literary pilgrimage to her past will move and enrich our quest for memory and understanding.”
—Elie Weisel

“A real life family saga…about Czech history and relations between men and women, Czechs and Jews, rich and poor. It is a compelling account, one that any woman trying to recover history will value.”
—Kirkus Reviews