Nalezená minulost – Epsteinová Helena (2025)

A deeply felt yet fresh and unsentimental memoir of one assimilated Central European Jewish family and three generations of extraordinary women. An impressive multigenerational saga that brings to life an old, vanished world. In 1989, after the death of her mother Franci, Helena Epstein decided to explore and revive the lives of three women in her lineage – her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother. Like most children of exiles and Holocaust survivors, the author of this book had almost no documents or family memorabilia. The only bridge to her own history was – alongside a few photographs and letters – her mother's twelve-page family chronicle and her unpublished memoir of her time in concentration camps. She set out to Czechoslovakia, Austria, and Israel to search for people who knew her family, and in libraries and archives across three continents, she uncovered traces of stories that formed a rich mosaic of her ancestors' lives. Helena's great-grandmother, seamstress Tereza, fell in love with a Christian but was instead married off to a Jewish housepainter. Around the time when Jews in Austria-Hungary were granted equal rights, she left Jihlava with her husband for Vienna in hopes of a better life. In the year...