Overview

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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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. She is an active member of Brooklyn Heights Synagogue and recently served as president of the congregation. The narrator of over 100 audiobooks, Christa Lewis has been nominated for an Audie Award and was a 2018 Listener's Choice finalist. She has been featured in AudioFile magazine and earned multiple Earphones Awards for recordings that have become Audible bestsellers in YA and literary fiction. Christa is a classically trained actress and graduate of Boston University's actor training program. She got her start as the voice of international television station DW-TV, and has been a regular on hundreds of cartoons, museum guides, documentaries, and commercials. Christa is bilingual-she speaks accent-free German fluently and can offer a variety of accents and dialects. An experienced teacher and director, Christa teaches commercial voice-over and audiobook narration.

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