Description
Born a German Jew in 1915 Rudy Baum was eightysix 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 fathers attempted suicide Karen Baum Gordon Rudys 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
In The Last Letter A Fathers Struggle a Daughters Quest and the Long Shadow of the Holocaust Gordon explores not only her fathers life story but also the stories and events that shaped the lives of her grandparentstwo Holocaust victims that Rudy tried in vain to save in the late 1930s and early years of World War II This investigation of her familys history is grounded in eightyeight letters written mostly by Julie Baum Rudys mother and Karens grandmother to Rudy between November 1936 and October 1941 In five parts Gordon examines pieces of these wellworn 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
Contains mature themes
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