MJH | Stories Survive: "Family Treasures" Book Talk

In her memoir, Family Treasures Lost and Found, journalist Karen A. Frenkel investigates her relatives’ unspoken stories of survival and the extremely unlikely odds of escaping the Nazis. Family Treasures is her detective story; an intergenerational sleuthing adventure using journalistic and genealogical research techniques to fill gaps in her family’s unspoken wartime tales. This memoir is more than a personal story, though; Karen provides historical and cultural context to her parents’ and sole-surviving grandfather’s unusual plights. They were not interned in concentration camps and survived through cunning and luck, which underscores their renewed relevance to displaced persons today. Her astonishing revelations document her family’s travails while enslaved or hounded across Europe, Cuba, Mexico, and to New York and Palestine. They illuminate the hidden truths surrounding tragic losses. Family Treasures also covers the pre-war culture of assimilated Polish Jews, enabled by an inherited collection of family portraits in oil and pastel, hundreds of photographs, documents and artifacts brought here by her great-grandparents, who escaped Berlin in late 1940. Karen also details ferocious antisemitism, key moments in WWII, resistance to fascism, altruism, serendipity, and great loss. Ultimately, Karen solves many mysteries, honors her parents and the lost, and is rewarded with a deep sense of connection to those she never met.

Frenkel will be in conversation about her book with Dr. Eva Fogelman.

Karen A. Frenkel is a technology journalist, editor, author, and documentary producer. In addition to writing Family Treasures Lost and Found, Karen has produced two versions of a tie-in documentary with the same title. One version is a 75-minute feature, the other was edited for high school students and is accompanied by a Discussion Guide for teachers. Early in her career, Karen co-authored with Isaac Asimov Robots: Machines in Man’s Image (Harmony) and has written three books for children about physics. Her articles have appeared in Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Bloomberg.com, Communications of the ACM, CyberTimes: The New York Times on the Web, Discover, Essence, FastCompany.com, Forbes, Personal Computing, Millimeter, New Media, Science Magazine, ScientificAmerican.com, Scientific American, Technology Review, The New York Times, The Village Voice, U.S. News and World Report, and other national publications. Her previous award-winning documentaries cover the impact of technology on society and appeared on public television. Minerva’s Machine: Women and Computing examines why few women were engineers and computer scientists in the 1980s and 1990s. Winner, Best Documentary in a Small Market, Exceptional Merit Media Award from the National Women’s Political Caucus and Radcliffe College, Best Documentary, Brooklyn Arts Council’s 30th Annual International Film and Video Festival, Best Television Series, Runner Up, Eleventh Annual Computer Press Award. net.LEARNING, a two-hour documentary, explores the trade-offs students and faculty made in early online classrooms. Winner, National Education Reporting First Prize, Television Documentary and Feature. Karen also blogs for The Times of Israel and previously wrote a blog called “WeAre1: A Family of….” Both address her parents’ wartime experiences and parallels today.

Dr. Eva Fogelman is a licensed psychologist, author, filmmaker. She is a founder of the Second Generation movement as well as the Hidden Child Foundation. Fogelman wrote and co-produced the award-winning film Breaking the Silence: The Generation After the Holocaust and is author of the Pulitzer Prize nominee, Conscience and Courage: Rescuers of Jews During the Holocaust.

This program is co-presented by Descendants of Holocaust Survivors and is part of their Transforming Moments: Second Generation of Holocaust Survivor program.

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