Karen Baum Gordon, "The Last Letter: A Father's Struggle, a Daughter's Quest, and the Long Shadow of the Holocaust" (U Tennessee Press, 2021)
Born a German Jew in 1915, Rudy Baum was eighty-six years old when he sealed the garage door of his Dallas home, turned on the car ignition, and tried to end his life. After confronting her father\u2019s attempted suicide, Karen Baum Gordon, Rudy\u2019s daughter, began a sincere effort to understand the sequence of events that led her father to that dreadful day in 2002. What she found were hidden scars of generational struggles reaching back to the camps and ghettos of the Third Reich.\nIn\xa0The Last Letter: A Father's Struggle, a Daughter's Quest, and the Long Shadow of the Holocaust\xa0(U Tennessee Press, 2021),\xa0Gordon explores not only her father\u2019s life story, but also the stories and events that shaped the lives of her grandparents\u2014two Holocaust victims that Rudy tried in vain to save in the late 1930s and early years of World War II. This investigation of her family\u2019s history is grounded in eighty-eight letters written mostly by Julie Baum, Rudy\u2019s mother and Karen\u2019s grandmother, to Rudy between November 1936 and October 1941. In five parts, Gordon examines pieces of these well-worn, handwritten letters and other archival documents in order to discover what her family experienced during the Nazi period and the psychological impact that reverberated from it in the generations that followed.\nPart of the Legacies of War series,\xa0The Last Letter\xa0is a captivating family memoir that spans events from the 1930s and Hitler\u2019s rise to power, through World War II and the Holocaust, to the present-day United States. In recreating the fatal journeys of her grandparents and tracing her father\u2019s efforts to save them an ocean away in America, Gordon discovers the forgotten fragments of her family\u2019s history and a vivid sense of her own Jewish identity. By inviting readers along on this journey, Gordon manages to honor victim and survivor alike and shows subsequent generations\u2014now many years after the tragic events of World War II\u2014what it means to remember.\n\ufeffAJ Woodhams\xa0hosts the "War Books" podcast. You can subscribe on Apple\xa0here\xa0and on Spotify\xa0here. War Books is on\xa0YouTube,\xa0Facebook\xa0and\xa0Instagram.\nLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices\nSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies