Rachela

About the Book

In this unique follow-up memoir to the author’s first book, From Out of the Firestorm: A Memoir of the Holocaust, young Rachela copes with a new language and culture, raising a family, finding a profession, and always seeking the company of the remaining relatives and friends from her vanished world of Eastern Europe. Rachela shares her amazement at the America of the sanitized Fifties, the revolutionary Sixties, and materialistic Seventies, reliving for us the impact of the JFK assassination, the Six Day War, the moon walk and more, even as private and national events (like Vietnam) provoke flashbacks of ghettos, deportations, and mass murder. Both terrifying crises and small comedic ones are magnified in the survivor-narrator’s eyes.

About the Author

Rachela Walshaw was a teenage girl when the Nazis firestormed her Polish hometown, deported and murdered most of her large family and enslaved her in munitions factories for most of the war. She emigrated to the United States in 1949 with her husband and infant son. The 1991 publication of Ms. Walshaw’s memoirs led to several major book reviews, and dozens of author appearances and presentations. Ms. Walshaw has published poetry and essays on the Holocaust and other topics