These past few days I have been able to do what I love best in my writing life: rummage around in family history. I’ve been rewriting an essay that O – The Oprah Magazine has expressed an interest in. It’s about the visit my sister and I paid to our great-great-grandparents’ former mill in the Czech countryside last September. To give it more depth, I had to go back in time and see if my grandmother’s handwritten memoirs (sadly, there are only 14 pages) would tell me more about the people that lived there and her adventures when she spent summers at the mill. More about that hopefully soon, if I can make that essay work!

But since I’ve been on that journey it’s only fitting that my guest post on Rivka’s Yiddish was published yesterday:

Filling in the Blanks on my Jewish Family History

A big thank you to Rivka for hosting me, and also for nudging me to write about the research I undertook in order to write Jumping Over Shadows. Initially I balked at writing about that because I did hit upon a possible family secret that I did not want to divulge–it is, I believe, one if the payoffs of reading Jumping Over Shadows. But, once I put my mind to it, I found that the process of putting it all together, namely the written family stories, the oral history, as well as finding relevant history books, going into archives, and traveling to the sites, made a good story in and of itself. So, please head on over to Rivka’s Yiddish!