The Last Letter: A Father's Struggle, A Daughter's Quest and the Long Shadow of the Holocaust

· Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by Christa Lewis
5.0
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9 hr 33 min
Unabridged
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About this audiobook

Born a German Jew in 1915, Rudy Baum was eighty-six years old when he sealed the garage door of his Dallas home, turned on the car ignition, and tried to end his life. After confronting her father's attempted suicide, Karen Baum Gordon, Rudy's daughter, began a sincere effort to understand the sequence of events that led her father to that dreadful day in 2002. What she found were hidden scars of generational struggles reaching back to the camps and ghettos of the Third Reich. In The Last Letter: A Father's Struggle, a Daughter's Quest, and the Long Shadow of the Holocaust, Gordon explores not only her father's life story, but also the stories and events that shaped the lives of her grandparents-two Holocaust victims that Rudy tried in vain to save in the late 1930s and early years of World War II. This investigation of her family's history is grounded in eighty-eight letters written mostly by Julie Baum, Rudy's mother and Karen's grandmother, to Rudy between November 1936 and October 1941. In five parts, Gordon examines pieces of these well-worn, handwritten letters and other archival documents in order to discover what her family experienced during the Nazi period and the psychological impact that reverberated from it in the generations that followed. Contains mature themes.

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5.0
1 review
sandra Tucker
April 29, 2022
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About the author

A graduate of Harvard College and Columbia Business School, Karen Baum Gordon cofounded Strategic Horizons, Inc., an executive coaching and management consulting firm. Karen is a Dallas native and now lives with her husband and black lab in Brooklyn, New York, and South Hero, Vermont.

Christa Lewis and her pseudonym Pippa Jayne have narrated 265 audiobooks between them. The recipient of eight AudioFile Earphones Awards in a variety of genres, Christa has also garnered a SOVAS Voice Arts Award, a Sultry Listeners Award, a Listeners Choice Award, and two Audie nominations.

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