Where She Came from: A Daughter's Search for Her Mother's History

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Along with millions of lives, the Holocaust stripped away the official records and family mementos that anchor personal histories. In 1989, after both the opening of Czechoslovakia to the outside world and the death of her mother Frances, a concentration-camp survivor, journalist Helen Epstein made her first tentative efforts to uncover her own history. Armed only with a 12-page letter written by her mother, she retraced family footsteps from the provincial town of Brtnice to Vienna, where her great-grandmother Josephine had killed herself in despair. In Prague, her spirited grandmother Pepi, who had been orphaned at age 8 and left in poverty, rose from those ashes to run a fashionable dressmaking salon. Pepi married a man who repudiated Judaism so completely that their daughter Frances learned of her background only as the Nazis rose to power. Epstein's meticulous research beautifully conjures the drama of their lives and times, carving out the surrounding culture until these three women stand against it in stark relief.


From Library Journal
After the death of her mother, journalist and author Epstein (Joe Papp, LJ 4/15/94) decided to uncover her mother's past to learn more about her ancestors, who were victims of the Holocaust. After eight years of research throughout the United States, Czechoslovakia, Austria, and Israel, Epstein brings us this account of Czechoslovak Jewry, chronicling the women in her family for three generations. Basing most of her research on a 12-page letter and an unpublished memoir written by her mother, Epstein traces her history by searching for information in archives and hunting down people who knew her family. Rich in detail, this work is told with a strong voice, and the result is a moving account of a family history and the strength of its women. Recommended for specialized collections, particularly those that focus on Jewish, Eastern European, Czech, and Holocaust studies.?Jill Jaracz, ChicagoCopyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, Ruth Gay
What we so 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.


From Kirkus Reviews
With this family history, Epstein (Children of the Holocaust, 1979, etc.) adds a vivid and telling chapter to the reconstruction of Jewish women's history, one life at a time. While she can't recover all the details of her great- grandmother Therese's, grandmother Pepi's, and mother Franci's lives in Czechoslovakia, she more than compensates by re-creating the times, the milieus, and the circumstances in which they found themselves. The settings range from the Bohemian town of Brtnice, to the Belle Epoque Vienna of assimilated Jews such as Freud, Mahler, and Herzl, where Therese committed suicide after her oldest son's death from peritonitis, to newly independent and cosmopolitan Prague in the 1920s, where Pepi ran a fashion salon in which wealthy women gathered to gossip, exchange intimacies, and catch up on the latest Paris fashions, and ultimately to Auschwitz, Bergen- Belsen, and finally New York. Focusing in particular on the social roles of women, Epstein presents Pepi's salon as ``a rare institution that allowed a woman to acquire expertise and authority . . . a feminine realm, where women could speak.'' For Pepi and for Franci, who took over the business at the age of 18, it also provided a solid income and a refuge from harsh realities: marital unhappiness, the advent of Hitler, impending war. All three, Therese, Pepi, and Franci, were strong, capable women who faced great adversity, from poverty to the loss of loved ones to war and near-extermination. Other remarkable women figure in Epstein's tale: sternly pious Aunt Rosa, who raised the orphaned Pepi and lived to regret marrying her off to a man who turned out to be syphilitic (he did at least refrain from consummating their union); a friend of Franci's who worked for the Czech resistance during WW II. There is much more in this 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 her history will value. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Gloria Steinem
Where She Came From brings three women into our lives, each born of a different generation of European history, anti-Semitism, and sexual politics, each giving birth to the other. These are Helen Epstein's foremothers, and they become our guides to the fragility and strength of the human spirit, to the concentric circles of ever-tightening restrictions that led people into concentration camps, 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.


Book Description
Helen Epstein's compassionate tribute to her family, Where She Came From, combines a moving ancestral history with the scrupulously researched fate of Eastern European Jews. The daughter of a Holocaust survivor, Epstein began her project after her mother's death, with only the stories of her family to guide her. For a period of over twelve years, the author traveled to Czechoslovakia, Austria, and Israel, and like an archaeologist with shards of data, pieced together her story of three generations of women. Through the traditional women's art of sewing, Epstein symbolically traces the lives of these women, affirming that "we think back through our mothers if we are women."


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