In her memoir, Family Treasures Lost and Found, journalist Karen A. Frenkel investigates her relatives’ unspoken stories of survival and the extremely unlikely odds of escaping the Nazis. Family Treasures is her detective story; an intergenerational sleuthing adventure using journalistic and genealogical research techniques to fill gaps in her family’s unspoken wartime tales. This memoir is more than a personal story, though; Karen provides historical and cultural context to her parents’ and sole-surviving grandfather’s unusual plights. They were not interned in concentration camps and survived through cunning and luck, which underscores their renewed relevance to displaced persons today. Her astonishing revelations document her family’s travails while enslaved or hounded across Europe, Cuba, Mexico, and to New York and Palestine. They illuminate the hidden truths surrounding tragic losses. Family Treasures also covers the pre-war culture of assimilated Polish Jews, enabled by an inherited collection of family portraits in oil and pastel, hundreds of photographs, documents and artifacts brought here by her great-grandparents, who escaped Berlin in late 1940. Karen also details ferocious antisemitism, key moments in WWII, resistance to fascism, altruism, serendipity, and great loss. Ultimately, Karen solves many mysteries, honors her parents and the lost, and is rewarded with a deep sense of connection to those she never met.
Frenkel will be in conversation about her book with Dr. Eva Fogelman.