I presented My City of Dreams today at the Jewish Book Council via Zoom. It’s difficult to present your book in two minutes but here it is. If you are visiting from JBC, I hope you will take a look at the video I just recorded from our home on Diamond Ledge in New Hampshire, where the story begins and ends. The book is also set in Syracuse NY, Boston, Israel, Germany, and, of course, Vienna. The book is out in hard cover and on Kindle, and shortly in Paperback and on Audible.
My Two Minutes
My City of Dreams is not just another Holocaust book. What makes these sad stories still relevant is their ongoing impact. We all struggle with aging, with family issues. Some of us struggle with depression. These are some of the other things I speak about in the book. I’ve worked as a physician with underserved populations in the US, Africa, and elsewhere. I’m helping to care for my medically-challenged grandson. Although not in the book, these experiences bring a perspective I can share with you if you ask me to visit.
At the core of this story is the mystery of my Aunt Mia, a girl who disappeared into Germany in 1941 when she was just fifteen. My father confused his memory of his sister with his memory of me growing up. He would not say her name out loud until a year before he died.
Despite all his trials, despite all his sadness and loss, my father begins his unfinished memoir with a line from a famous song: “Vienna, Vienna, only you will always be the city of my dreams.” I begin in the same place because my father’s early stories were charming, and he maintained that optimistic and positive view of the world for most of his life, even visiting Austria many times with my mother as a tourist. It was only in old age that he began having flashbacks and a recurring nightmare about being buried alive.
Mia visits me, and she tells her story. I weave together that story, my father’s and mine with photographs, letters, family diaries and memoirs, poetry, primary source documents, my father’s writing and those joyful tales he told me long ago. It is a Holocaust tale, but it is also very much a modern day love story, of one father and his daughter, about how trauma travels down though generations and about how we all find meaning in our lives.