Böcker av Andrea Simon

We call ourselves the Lady Bunch. One of our nine members named us after the iconic TV show The Brady Bunch, which introduces its cast members in a rectangular format. As we begin our monthly Zoom meetings, each member pops into view like a Brady kid, and we fit snugly into our triple-line grid. Here's the Story . . . is our first compilation of the writing that emerged from our Zoom meetings since 2020 at an online course called "Writing about Your Mom without Guilt," for the Story Circle Network, an international nonprofit writing organization. Not ready to end our special bond, we continued to meet and share our writing after the course ended. What has emerged is this anthology of forty-two pieces: essays, stories, and poems. In this book, we didn't focus on the usual "female" subjects, such as our significant others, children, and jobs. We wrote about the women we had been and the women we wanted to be. Each of us had lived a full and singular life. Women are capable of generous and congenial support. We lift each other during life's trials and rejoice in our successes. As such, we think this unique collection will inspire and entertain many, taking readers on a provocative journey. We are: Amy Baruch, Stephanie Cowell, Linda Aronovsky Cox, Karen Finch, Jane Mylum Gardner, Rhonda Hunt-Del Bene, Katherine Kirkpatrick, Kathleen M. Rodgers, and Andrea Simon.

Haunted by her grandmother's Old World stories and larger-than-life persona, Andrea Simon undertook a spiritual search for her lost family. Her quest for truth gave tragic answers. Using newly translated archival records, she peeled back layers of clues to confront the mystery. This story of her momentous odyssey reveals the terrible fate of her kin. From her grandmother's village of Volchin in Belarus, she followed the trail of the death march taken by the village Jews to the place of their slaughter in 1942. During the same period, in Brona Gora forest some 50,000 Jews were shot. Simon was in one of the first American groups to visit this little-publicized site. Mass shootings of Jews, particularly in the Soviet Union, have not been addressed with the same focus given to concentration camp atrocities. Yet Simon's research reveals that Nazis killed nearly 50 percent of their Jewish victims by means other than gassing. Thus Simon fills a significant gap in Holocaust history by providing the most extensive report yet on the executions at Brona Gora and Volchin. As she interweaves tragic narrative with evocative family anecdotes, Simon writes a story of life in czarist Russia and of her family's flight from pogroms and persecution. From a unique vantage Simon's memoir discloses her dogged genealogical search, the newly perceived Jewish history she uncovered, and the ramifications of the Holocaust in the postwar generation.