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.
Full Product Details
Author: Karen Baum Gordon ,
Christa Lewis
Publisher: Tantor Audio
Imprint: Tantor Audio
Edition: Library Edition
ISBN: 9798212119658
Publication Date: 28 December 2021
Audience:
General/trade
,
General
Format: Audio
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: In Print
This item will be ordered in for you from one of our suppliers. Upon receipt, we will promptly dispatch it out to you. For in store availability, please contact us.
Author Information
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. Christa Lewis has narrated over two hundred audiobooks. She is a classically trained actress with a four-year conservatory training in voice and acting. She has a smart and funny vibe, but can also meet the moment in straightforward or somber works of nonfiction thanks to a seventeen-year stint as a newsreader. Christa speaks accent-free German fluently and offers a variety of believable accents and dialects. Her narrations are well received--there have been seven Earphones awards across a variety of genres--YA, literary fiction, biography and memoir--a 2019 SOVAS Voice Arts Award in Biography and two Audie nominations. Pippa Jayne was the Sultry Listeners' Award Winner 2019 in the Erotica category.
