Two and a half years ago, when COVID tilted the world on its axis and swept us all into isolation, my family proposed a weekly Zoom---a means to check in on one another, to visit safely and to stay sane via some human, friendly interaction. While not everyone has been able to make every meeting,…
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Friends! It's been a minute since I've posted to my blog (my apologies--I'll blame the radio silence on the pandemic, and on a looming deadline for Book 2!). Let me catch you up with the latest news. As I reported some time ago, my dear friend Thomas Kail optioned We Were the Lucky Ones for television. After…
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I was fifteen years old when I learned that I came from a family of Holocaust survivors. Schlomo (Sol) and Nechuma with their children (from left), Addy (my grandfather), Jakob, Halina, Mila, and Genek The discovery sparked a dizzying array of questions, the most unsettling of which was: Why was I just learning…
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Honored to review We Germans for the NYTimes Book Review, in the 8/30/20 issue devoted to World War II at 75. This does feel like an opportune moment to seek out "perspectives starkly different from our own."
Read MoreWe Were the Lucky Ones has turned out to be a book club favorite. In this 3-minute video interview, Georgia reflects on her own book club experiences. If you or your book group would like some questions and topics for discussion, help yourself to the Reader’s Guide.
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It's been six weeks since the launch of We Were the Lucky Ones---a milestone made all the more monumental by the photos that flooded my inbox in the days that followed---photos of friends with the book in their laps at the beach, on an airplane, at home cozied up on the couch; photos of the U.K. edition spotted at Waterstones in London…
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Two weeks ago, I had the honor of being invited by Penguin Random House (PRH) to join a panel of six authors with forthcoming titles at an Open Book event in New York. Our assignment, we were told prior to the event, was to speak for ten minutes each about our books to a group of 100 librarians from…
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I left you last month with a post about my editor---and I promise to update you on Jane's encouraging feedback at a later date. This post, however, I'd like to dedicate to my grandmother, Caroline, who passed away on Tuesday, two days short of her 100th birthday. Left: Young Caroline with her parents and brothers…
Read MoreI've been out of touch, and I apologize---this has been a difficult post to craft. Writing it sends me back to the day at the end of October when, half way through our pregnancy, Robert and I lost our baby girl. We spent the first half of November cocooned in our home. We held each…
Read MoreA couple of months ago, I received a request for alumni updates from Siobhan Welsh at the Gordon School in Rhode Island, where I attended 1st through 8th grade. When Siobhan heard about my book project, she immediately asked if I would consider coming in to speak with Gordon's 8th grade class about my family's story.…
Read MoreAs a new mom, I'm always on the lookout for tips on parenting. A year and a half ago, when I was still sporting a baby bump, my shelves were piled with the usual prerequisites---Baby 411, The Happiest Baby on the Block, What to Expect: the First Year. Wyatt, one month old, stares…
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I'll never forget the day I got the call. I was at my uncle's house in Warwick, Rhode Island for dinner. My cell phone rang as we were sitting down to eat. Who did I know with a 919 area code? And then it dawned on me. Eliska's voice was deep, with a thick accent,…
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Last April, I received a letter from the Memorial Center in Moscow---an organization I contacted in hopes of tracking down additional information about my great-uncle Genek, who was deported from Poland in 1941, along with his wife Herta, to one of Stalin's Siberian gulags. The letter I received from the Memorial Center in…
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The Sunday before last, the New York Times published an article entitled Proudly Bearing Elders’ Scars, Their Skin Says ‘Never Forget.’ In it, journalist Jodi Rudoren describes a movement among twenty- and thirty-somethings to replicate the tattoos worn on the the forearms of their Holocaust-survivor relatives. I found the piece both chilling and inspiring. …
Read MoreAfter six weeks of squatting with friends and another six weeks of tackling travel writing assignments and endless piles of boxes, we're (nearly!) settled in our new home...which means, at long last, I can return to my book. Inspired by a recent visit from my cousin-once-removed, Michel (visiting New York from Brazil), I thought I'd…
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I've been thinking a lot recently about the meaning of "home." A month ago, after a seven-year stint in Seattle, Robert and I packed up six-month-old Wyatt and all of our belongings and caught a one-way flight to Connecticut. The day before our move, however, our CT lease fell through, and our world turned upside…
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You guessed right, Daryl---the mosaic in the banner photo above lives just off the shore of Ipanema beach in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Congratulations on being the first to respond correctly---your iTunes gift card is on the way (you should consider downloading Getz & Gilberto's Girl from Ipanema to commemorate your win!). Robert and I visited…
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"I wasn't the only one in the family with multiple identities," Ricardo said when he'd finished explaining the story behind his two birth certificates. "During the war, my parents went by the name BRZOZA." Ricardo's father, it turns out, was part of the Jewish Underground. He made false papers. "How?" I asked. "He replicated the stamps…
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Last night I watched a documentary called 50 Children, the Rescue Mission of Mr. and Mrs. Kraus (available on HBO until 5/5), about a Philadelphia couple, Gilbert and Eleanor Kraus, who set off in 1939 on a mission to bring 50 Jewish children out of Nazi-occupied Austria. The Krauses faced several daunting obstacles along the way---they themselves…
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A month after I returned from Paris, I flew to Miami to interview Ricardo, Anna's older brother (my grandfather's nephew). Ricardo was born just after the war, although when, and where exactly, seemed to be something of a mystery. "Ask him about his birthdays," my mother suggested, before I left. "Birthday...S?" "Yeah. He has two of them."…
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Hello, friends and family! Little Man Wyatt has rounded the three month bend and I'm happy to report that I'm back (well, almost) from the Land of the Sleep Deprived, and excited to get the ball rolling again on blog posts. I left you last in Paris, where I'd spent an afternoon interviewing Felicia (daughter of…
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Dear family, friends, and followers of The Lucky Ones, Exciting news on the home front--Robert and I have welcomed a new branch to our family tree! Thomas Wyatt Farinholt ("Wyatt") arrived on November 23rd, just over three weeks early (in true Kurc fashion, he's already on his own schedule--determined to take fate into his own…
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In February of '08 I flew to Paris to interview two relatives: Felicia and Anna (daughters of Mila and Halina, my grandfather’s two sisters). Equipped with a digital voice recorder and an empty moleskin notebook (and a flutter in my stomach that kept me wide awake for the duration of my ten-hour overnight journey), February 11, 2008 will…
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It was January 17th, 2008 when I finally picked my mother’s black binder up off the shelf. A new year, full of resolutions, including one big one—to unearth and record my family history. I sat cross-legged on my couch in Seattle, the binder resting on my lap, took a long, slow breath, and flipped it…
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(Continued from Thirty-Two Relatives Under One Roof: a Raucous-Turned-Revelational Family Reunion) It turns out my grandfather (who later changed his name, for obvious reasons, from Adolph/Addy to Eddy), was just one of over twenty Kurcs originally from Radom, Poland. He was living in Toulouse in ‘39 at the start of the war. When he learned it would…
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In July of 2000, the summer after I graduated from the University of Virginia, my mother organized a Kurc family reunion at our house on Martha’s Vineyard. She invited thirty-two relatives (many of whom she hadn’t seen in over twenty years), and to her surprise, all thirty-two RSVPed, “Of course we’ll be there!” We rented…
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