No question, social media can be a time sink, but sometimes you meet really interesting people on line. Today's guest poster, Julian Preisler, falls into this category. Because the subjects he's writing about are of great interest to me -- as I think they will be to you -- I'm turning my blog over to him. Also, I was one of the people he enlisted to take pictures for his book.
Books
Grief, Food, & Nudity: A Story About My Mother & My New Book
Not long after my father died, I went to Martinique with my mother. I remember three things about that trip. My mother's grief. The profiteroles. And the topless beach. Grief, food, and nudity My mother was in a raw stage of mourning, subject to fits of literal wailing. But no one in my family was ever too upset to eat, especially dessert. And Martinique is a French island,
Of Chutzpah, Kickstarter, and Keeping a Low Profile
When I was growing up, my mother always implied that my sister and I should keep a low profile. We were supposed to excel in school, sure, but not to stand out because otherwise "they" would find us, even though we grew up in America, even though "they" found everyone they wanted to find in Vienna -- i.e., anyone who was even part Jewish, no matter how low a profile the
Freud’s Butcher, the Poem
As I mentioned in my introduction to the Genealogy section, I've trotted out the fact that I am the grand-niece of Sigmund Freud's butcher for a long time, especially to people I thought might be interested. Two of those people were Charles Bernstein and Susan Bee, who wrote and illustrated a poem about the topic that appears in a small volume called The Nude Formalism
Genealogy: I See Live People
I'm new to genealogy. I'd always thought it was a discipline that dealt strictly with dead people, with the goal of bringing them back to life. I knew that my particular quest, exploring the lives of the members of a Jewish family in pre-World World II Vienna, would be filled with emotional land mines: the unnatural (to put it mildly) disruption of those lives that would be