Helen Epstein

Heda Kovály

Heda Margolius Kovály's steady gaze at the lives caught up in Czechoslovakia's tragic fate under the Nazis and then during the Stalin era illuminates the chaotic life of a nation. Kovály was deported to concentration camps, escaped from a death march, nearly starved in the post-war years, only to be shattered by her husband's conviction (in the infamous 1952 Slansky trial) and his execution. Resonant with lyricism, this gripping memoir is uplifting even in the midst of horror.

A Life in Prague, 1941-1968

Under a Cruel Star

Africa, the West, and the Fight Against AIDS

The Invisible Cure

A provocative analysis of the AIDS epidemic in Africa looks at the social, economic, and political factors that have caused and exacerbated the situation; its impact on gender relations and the spread of HIV; the devastating effects of the disease on entire countries; and possible solutions to the crisis. 30,000 first printing.

Born to survivors of Auschwitz and Terezin, the author recounts her private quest to come to terms with her parents' past, a quest which took her to Israel and into the home of other children of concentration-camp survivors

Conversations with Sons and Daughters of Survivors

Children of the Holocaust

In 1993, Helen Epstein, a scientist working with a biotechnology company searching for an AIDS vaccine, moved to Uganda, where she witnessed first-hand the suffering caused by the HIV virus. The Invisible Cure, dramatic, illuminating and beautifully written, recounts the struggle of international health experts, governments and ordinary Africans to understand the devastating spread of HIV in Africa, and traces how their responses to the crisis have changed in light of new medical developments and political realities. The AIDS epidemic in Africa is uniquely severe. It is partly a consequence of the political, social, and economic upheavals of the past century, which have left millions of Africans adrift in an increasingly globalized world. Their poverty and social dislocation have generated an earthquake in gender relations that has had devastating consequences for the spread of the HIV virus. Epstein argues that there are ways to address this crisis that may be simpler than many people imagine. A deeply affecting story of scientific breakthroughs and false starts, and of the human costs of policymakers’ missteps and inaction, The Invisible Cure will change the way we think about AIDS, a disease without precedent.

Africa, the West and the Fight Against AIDS

This daughter's profile of Czechoslovak swimmer and water polo player Kurt Epstein (1904-1975) traces the history of Jewish athletes in Central Europe and provides a case study of one such life-long athlete. Epstein grew up a stone's throw from the Elbe River and began swimming before the First World War, when his town of Roudnice nad Labem was still part of Austria-Hungary. In high school, he became a competitive rower and swimmer, challenging prevailing stereotypes about Jews and becoming a leading Czechoslovak water polo player and swimming coach, representing his country at two Olympic Games, in 1928 and 1936. In addition to describing the cultural background of the Epstein family in the Bohemian countryside, the book examines Kurt Epstein's decision to participate in the 1936 Berlin "Nazi" Olympics, and follows him through a series of Nazi concentration camps back to Prague, where he was elected member of the Czechoslovak National Olympic Committee. After the Communist putsch of 1948, Epstein vowed to flee "in a swimsuit if necessary" and, at 44, emigrated to New York City where he became a cutter in the garment district, swam weekly at the St. George pool in Brooklyn, and served as Treasurer of The Association of Czechoslovak Sportsmen in Exile in the Western World.

A Jewish Athlete: Swimming Against Stereotype in 20th Century Europe

Vlasta Schönová

An unusual memoir by a professional actress in Ghetto Theresienstadt. Vlasta Schönová, or Vava as she was known, began her theater career as a teenager before the Nazis occupied Czechoslovakia. For a while, she was able to continue acting by passing as a non-Jew. After her deportation to Terezín, she performed, directed and wrote plays as a prisoner. Theater, she writes, invested her life with meaning and kept her alive, even in the most deadly circumstances. Based on a notebook the actress kept, Acting in Terezín is translated from the Czech by Vava's cousin, Helen Epstein, author of Children of the Holocaust and Where She Came From. It features seven extraordinary theater posters from the Terezín Memorial's collection. Acting in Terezín is excerpted from Vlasta Schönová's memoir Chtěla jsem být herečkou (I Wanted to be An Actress), published in Prague in 1993. A Hebrew edition was published in Israel in 1991 as Lehiyot Sachkanit (To Be an Actress) and translated into English by Michelle Fram Cohen (Hamilton Books, 2010). Both books describe Vava's life before the war in Prague, and after the war in Israel. "A powerful, original narrative, pungently translated, that reveals the vulnerability of women during the Holocaust and shows the reader a broad cast of characters – from rescuers with moral convictions to those who sexually abused their charges." – Eva Fogelman, Ph. D., author of Conscience and Courage: Rescuers of Jews During the Holocaust "I saw Schönová perform Cocteau in Terezín in 1943. Today I see the play as a piece of kitsch. Then, I was mesmerized by her performance. I was 18 years old and for an hour or so I was lifted out of the camp environment to somewhere in Paris... free." –Lily Reiser, MSW and Terezín survivor "As an artist, what I find most powerful in this memoir is how Vava transformed impossibly hopeless experience into something not only livable but meaningful through theater." – Rochelle Rubinstein

Acting in Terezín

"I set out to find a group of people who, like me, were possessed by a history they had never lived." The daughter of Holocaust survivors, Helen Epstein traveled from America to Europe to Israel, searching for one vital thin in common: their parent's persecution by the Nazis. She found: • Gabriela Korda, who was raised by her parents as a German Protestant in South America; • Albert Singerman, who fought in the jungles of Vietnam to prove that he, too, could survive a grueling ordeal; • Deborah Schwartz, a Southern beauty queen who—at the Miss America pageant, played the same Chopin piece that was played over Polish radio during Hitler's invasion. Epstein interviewed hundreds of men and women coping with an extraordinary legacy. In each, she found shades of herself.

Dieses Buch ist die Erinnerung einer Tochter an die Familie ihrer Mutter, und die Fortsetzung des bahnbrechenden Buches Die Kinder des Holocaust. Dank ihrer journalistischen Ausbildung zeigt Helen Epstein, wie durch dokumentarische Recherche Familiengeschichte zutage befördert und die historische Kluft der Shoah überbrückt werden kann. Dieses Buch ist sowohl ein Bericht aus dem eigenen Leben, als auch eine Familiengeschichte und Sozialgeschichte der zentraleuropäischen Juden im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Zwölf eng beschriebene Seiten hinterlässt Frances Epstein ihrer Tochter; für Helen werden sie zum Ausgangspunkt einer Reise auf den Spuren der Frauen ihrer Familie. Die drei Generationen von Frauen, die sie porträtiert, sind Schneiderinnen; sie führten Modesalons, die damals Zufluchtsorte und eine der wenigen Institutionen waren, wo Frauen frei reden konnten. „Was wir kurz ,kulturelle Anpassung’ nennen, ist ein Hauptthema von Helen Epsteins neuem, fesselndem Buch Dreifach heimatlos. Im Spiegel einer Familienchronik beschreibt sie lebendig das Leben der Juden in Tschechien. Epstein ist schonungslos in der Beschreibung der Mühsalen einer Verpflanzung und – im Gegensatz zu manchen Familienbiographen, die voll durch ihre Charaktere eingenommen sind – tritt sie aus der Erzählung heraus, um sich selbst zu sehen.” — Ruth Gay, New York Times Book Review „Helen Epsteins Familiengeschichte ist ein gelungenes, intimes Porträt dreier starker Frauen in schwierigen Zeiten.” — Wiener Zeitung „In Epsteins sachkundiger und einfühlsamer Erzählung wird Wahrheit nicht nur faszinierender als Dichtung sondern mitreissender, sinnvoller und kraftvoller.” —Gloria Steinem „Helen Epsteins literarische Pilgerfahrt in ihre Vergangenheit bereichert unsere Suche nach Lebenserinnerungen und deren Verständnis. Geschrieben mit ihrem ausserordentlichen Talent für Geschichtenschreiben ist ihre Erzählung tief menschlich.”— Elie Wiesel In ihrem ersten Buch Die Kinder des Holocaust untersucht Helen Epstein generationsbedingte Traumata.

Dreifach heimatlos: Die Suche einer Tochter nach der verlorenen Welt ihrer Mutter

Conversations With Sons and Daughters of Survivors

Joseph Papp (1921-1991), theater producer, champion of human rights and of the First Amendment, founder of the New York Shakespeare Festival and Public Theater, changed the American cultural landscape. Born Yussel Papirofsky in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, he discovered Shakespeare in public school and first produced a show on an aircraft carrier during World War II. After a stint at the Actors’ Lab in Hollywood, he moved to New York, where he worked as a CBS stage manager during the golden age of television. He fought Parks Commissioner Robert Moses (as well as Mayors Wagner, Lindsay, Beame and Koch) winning first the right to stage free Shakespeare in New York’s Central Park, then municipal funding to keep it going. He built the Delacorte Theater and later rebuilt the former Astor Library on Lafayette Street, transforming it into the Public Theater. In addition to helping create an "American" style of Shakespeare, Papp pioneered colorblind casting and theater as a not-for-profit institution. He showcased playwrights David Rabe, Elizabeth Swados, Ntozake Shange, David Hare, Wallace Shawn, John Guare, and Vaclav Havel; directors Michael Bennett, Wilford Leach and James Lapine; actors Al Pacino, Colleen Dewhurst, George C. Scott, James Earl Jones, Meryl Streep, Kevin Kline, Sam Waterston, and Denzel Washington; and produced Hair, Sticks and Bones, for colored girls, The Normal Heart, and A Chorus Line, the longest running musical in Broadway history. "This first biography of the late Joseph Papp will be a hard act to follow." — Booklist "The final portrait that emerges might have been jointly painted by Goya, Whistler and Francis Bacon." — Benedict Nightingale, front-page New York Times Sunday Book Review Playwright Tony Kushner called Papp "one of the very few heroes this tawdry, timid business has produced" and the book, a "nourishing and juicy biography." "Helen Epstein recounts [Papp's] career in [this] definitive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography. [...] It is a tribute to Epstein’s narrative skill that the detailed account of Papp’s decline and eventual defeat by cancer [...] reads as both riveting and horrifying." — Ellen Schiff, All About Jewish Theatre Oklahoma-born Paul Davis created 51 iconic posters for Joseph Papp, starting in 1975 with the New York Shakespeare Festival production of "Hamlet" starring Sam Waterston. "It was inspiring to work with Joe," says Davis. "We would discuss what he wanted to achieve in a production, and he trusted me to find a way to express it. And he respected the poster as its own dramatic form." The artist’s work has been exhibited in the U.S., Europe and Japan. He is a recipient of a special Drama Desk award created for his theater art. Davis was elected to the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame and the Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame, and is a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome.

Joe Papp: An American Life

[…] Beaucoup de ceux qui ont traversé l’expérience analytique en parlent non pas comme d’un travail qui les a guéris, mais comme d’une démarche qui les a sauvés. À la lecture des textes d’Helen Epstein, on est touché par cette évidence : l’écriture est pour elle une nécessité vitale, celle de donner du sens à son existence, de « trouver sa propre voix et sa propre langue », ce qui rentre en écho, bien évidemment, avec l’expérience du divan, qui fut sienne également. Littérature et psychanalyse ne s’opposent pas dans son travail, mais au contraire se nourrissent mutuellement, allant toutes deux jusqu’à déclencher chez elle cette « vitesse psychique », énergie créatrice proche de l’entrée dans la « zone » bien connue des sportifs, celle du dépassement de soi. Car c’est bien d’énergie dont il s’agit ici, associée à la force morale et physique nécessaire pour ouvrir une brèche dans le mur de douleur édifié par la génération précédente. Il faut du courage, en effet, pour oser s’y aventurer et traduire enfin en mots cette expérience sur laquelle aucune parole n’avait encore été déposée. Peut-on mieux décrire la situation d’un enfant prisonnier de cet héritage que ne le fait Helen Epstein dans ces lignes : « Pendant des années tout est resté enfermé dans une chambre forte, enfoui si profondément en moi que je n’étais même pas sûre de ce que c’était […]. Les fantômes, eux, avaient une forme et un nom, ce qui reposait à l’intérieur de moi n’en avait pas. Quoi que ce fût, sa puissance était telle que les mots s’effritaient avant toute description » ? C’est à la fois l’écriture et la psychanalyse qui vont lui permettre la mise en forme symbolique de ce qui gisait obscurément dans cette crypte, et ces deux démarches ouvriront à celle qui en était porteuse l’accès à un savoir. Mais s’il faut qu’elle sache, il faut aussi que « cela se sache », le travail d’Helen Epstein obéissant au double impératif de la connaissance de soi et de la transmission. Le rapport entre fiction et non-fiction est une question à laquelle tout écrivain se voit confronté. Helen Epstein l’aborde en proclamant son goût pour « les récits de vie », ceux qui amènent l’auteur à tremper sa plume dans son propre sang, dans la chair de sa propre existence. Elle n’est pas dupe pour autant du fait que « ce que nous concevons comme récit de vie est, bien sûr, une construction du souvenir truffée d’erreur, d’interprétation, de fantasme ». Comment ne pas penser ici à un texte de Freud, Constructions en analyse, et à ce que l’inventeur de la psychanalyse y dit des effets positifs d’un tel travail, même lorsque ce dernier ne parvient pas à restituer le cœur du souvenir : « Très souvent on ne réussit pas à ce que le patient se rappelle le refoulé. En revanche, une analyse correctement menée le convainc fermement de la vérité de la construction, ce qui, du point de vue thérapeutique, a le même effet qu’un souvenir retrouvé. » […] (Préface de Philippe Grimbert : La vérité selon Helen Epstein)

Écrire la vie

« C’est dans l’atelier du salon de couture de ma mère que je suis tombée amoureuse des femmes de ma famille maternelle. » Enfant de rescapés de la Shoah, Helen Epstein continue à explorer son passé familial. Une quête universelle qui recoupe l’histoire de l’Europe. D’où vient-elle ? est le second volet d’une trilogie commencée en 1979 avec la parution aux Etats-Unis du livre Le traumatisme en héritage (préfacé par Boris Cyrulnik) devenu un classique de la transmission de l’histoire des parents à leurs enfants. A travers les traces qu’elles ont pu laisser, Helen Epstein dessine le parcours de trois femmes, depuis son arrière grand-mère jusqu’à sa mère, parcours accidenté mais néanmoins continu. Que ce soit en Bohême, à Prague, à Vienne, à Paris ou à New York, leur cheminement témoigne de l’énergie et de l’obstination de ces femmes actives et indépendantes à façonner leur propre existence. Cette détermination s’est transmise jusqu’à l’auteur qui a entrepris un long périple pour retisser leur passé englouti par le temps et la Seconde Guerre mondiale. Dans une écriture fulgurante, Helen Epstein nous raconte la reconstitution de ce puzzle. D’où vient-elle ? est à la fois un livre de voyage, un livre d’histoire et une chronique familiale. « Tout ce que Helen Epstein écrit est une quête. Quête de souvenirs, de sens aussi. Dans l’ouvrage présent, c’est vers sa mère que se tourne son regard. Sa tendresse, ses angoisses. Les ténèbres peuplant son passé. Le réveil à la vie, à la joie quotidienne, à l'espérance. Son récit si riche est beau, émouvant et enrichissant. » — Elie Wiesel « D’où vient-elle ?, formidable pièce historiographique, est le témoignage d’une journaliste qui a eu le courage de se plonger dans sa douloureuse histoire familiale. [...] En 400 pages d’un travail de synthèse historique magistral qui se lisent comme un roman, Epstein réalise un tour de force journalistique et généalogique. » — Jerusalem Post

D’où vient-elle ? Une fille part à la recherche de l'histoire de sa mère

This intrepid memoir tracks sexual harassment and sexual abuse in the life of a veteran American journalist. It also describes the long and ultimately successful psychotherapy the author undertook to heal. The Long Half-Lives of Love and Trauma“invents its own genre,” wrote Sherry Turkle. “The author suspects sexual abuse in her childhood and investigates with the toolkits of an historian and ethnographer.” The result is a memoir that is what Eva Hoffman calls, “a true labor of memory, in which the story of the body is inseparable from the narrative of the self.” This memoir is the third of a non-fiction trilogy, following Helen Epstein’s Children of the Holocaust: Conversations with Sons and Daughters of Survivors (Putnam, 1979) and Where She Came From: A Daughter’s Search for Her Mother’s History (Little, Brown, 1997), both widely translated. As Gloria Steinem wrote, “In Epstein’s hands, truth becomes not only stranger than fiction but more magnetic.” “Clear-eyed, fearless, taboo-breaking... This trilogy is unusual not only because nearly 40 years separate the first and last volumes — with the second positioned midway at the 20-year mark — but also because the works differ so greatly in style, structure, and content... The Long Half-Lives of Love and Trauma’s major contribution is its willingness to talk openly and place forefront a personal trauma of sexual abuse in its post-Holocaust context... Helen Epstein has consistently rejected sanitizing Jewish history — including women’s history... She has refused to keep secrets that she knew needed to be told and she has avoided idealization, nostalgia, and hagiography.” — Irena Klepfisz, Tablet Magazine “Epstein takes the reader through her decades-long process of self-discovery, understanding and healing accomplished through a strong bond of friendship, a solid and supportive family, and the powerfully restorative effects of psychoanalysis... written with page-turning clarity, openness and complete honesty... This is a ground-breaking memoir in style and in its contribution to the issues of sexual abuse.” —Berkshire Eagle “This book invents its own genre. Eminent journalist Helen Epstein suspects sexual abuse in her childhood and investigates with the full arsenal of what is available to her as an adult: the literature on trauma and false memory; the tools of psychoanalysis as well as a sophisticated understanding of its limitations; the toolkits of an historian and ethnographer. And access to a key witness... That rare story in which everyone becomes more human and multi-dimensional as it unfolds.” — Sherry Turkle, author of Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age “In this poignant, vividly written and fearlessly frank memoir, Helen Epstein probes, with sensitivity and insight, the multi-layered ambiguities of love, intimate relationships, and post-Holocaust American lives. More than a chronicle of events, this is a true labor of memory, in which the story of the body is inseparable from the narrative of the self.” — Eva Hoffman, author of Lost in Translation “In midlife, well settled in marriage and motherhood, Epstein is impelled to revisit the legacy of her childhood. As she risks both her own sanity and the relationships she holds most dear, Epstein illustrates the complex moral and psychological effects of trauma, and the gritty process of recovery.” — Judith Herman, M.D., author ofTrauma and Recovery “Helen Epstein’s career has been devoted to tracking how political and cultural history penetrates family life over generations. Her books have been models of investigation. This new memoir plants an even deeper stake into the search through personal trauma... This is heroic writing, and belongs in the canon of accounts of mothers and daughters, of wounds lost in the depth of childhood, and the valiant determination of a woman to live in uncertainty with grace.” — Patricia Hampl, author of I Could Tell You Stories “In this riveting book, Helen Epstein probes the dark corners of her childhood with sensitivity and remarkable candor. This memoir reads like a detective story and asks questions that affect us all: how does our sexual nature get formed or deformed, and how can it change? Unflinching writing.” — Anne Karpf, author of The War After: Living with the Holocaust “Courageously peeling back layers of her own psyche, Helen Epstein describes how one is able to withstand and survive trauma, and perhaps even more difficult to heal from it. While tracing her own trajectory, Epstein offers a riveting cultural history of America in the late twentieth century.” — Helen Fremont, author of After Long Silence “Helen Epstein has crafted an unclassifiable masterwork of nonfiction from the materials of personal memory, family history, romance, and trauma. Never in her distinguished career has Epstein written more openly or more beautifully.” — David Hajdu, author of Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña, and Richard Fariña “Candid and penetrating... Epstein meticulously unravels the fabric of her past... A relentlessly probing memoir of a search for self-knowledge.” — Kirkus

The Long Half-Lives of Love and Trauma

In Scrivere la vita, raccolta di testi brevi all’incrocio tra saggistica e memorie, Helen Epstein reinterpreta, nello stile chiaro e diretto che la contraddistingue, il proprio vissuto di giornalista, scrittrice di memorie, figlia di sopravvissuti all’Olocausto e analizzanda. Da New York a Gerusalemme, da Praga a Boston, l’autrice si immerge con il lettore nel flusso dei ricordi e delle esperienze. Con accuratezza giornalistica e agilità narrativa, ripercorre il proprio percorso professionale, cominciato per caso a Praga, durante l’invasione sovietica dell’agosto 1968, e maturato in Israele e negli Stati Uniti, paese in cui la famiglia Epstein aveva già trovato rifugio vent’anni prima. Saranno proprio le complesse vicende familiari a spingere l’autrice verso il genere memorialistico, con la pubblicazione di Figli dell’Olocausto e Di madre in figlia; tra questi eventi spicca la morte della madre, ultima di una genealogia di donne la cui storia viene ricostruita attraverso indagini minuziose e il prezioso aiuto di altre persone. In questa ricerca necessaria e dolorosa, leggere memorie scritte da altri, come il Libro rosso di Jung e le opere di molte scrittrici, si rivela un’esperienza profondamente curativa, complementare al lungo percorso psicoanalitico che aiuterà l’autrice a portare in superficie ricordi traumatici sepolti nel profondo della memoria.

Scrivere la vita

After the death of her mother, Epstein decided to uncover her mother's past to learn more about her ancestors who were victims of the holocaust. This is a memoir of a central European Jewish family and three generations of remarkable women.

A Daughter's Search for Her Mother's History

Where She Came From

Many people have written memoirs of childhood trauma but few have written as beautifully about the psychological obstacles and creative aids to healing. In midlife, well settled in marriage and motherhood, Helen Epstein is impelled to revisit her growing up in a family and community of Holocaust survivors. Epstein, the daughter of Czech anti-Communist refugees, contacts her first love, the son of blacklisted American Communists, to be her partner in the investigation of their adolescent past. In this twist on the age-old Romeo and Juliet story, the two uncover more than they bargained for.This memoir stands alone but can also be seen as the third of a trilogy, following Children of the Holocaust: Conversations with Sons and Daughters of Survivors (Putnam, 1979) and Where She Came From: A Daughter¿s Search for Her Mother¿s History (Little, Brown, 1997), both still in print and widely translated. As Gloria Steinem wrote about the second, ¿In Epstein¿s hands, truth becomes not only stranger than fiction but more magnetic.¿Veteran journalist Helen Epstein employs a full arsenal of narrative and investigative techniques. She researches the literature of trauma and false memory, and draws on the tools of psychoanalysis, social and cultural history, and journalism. She also draws on her own eight years of work with a psychoanalyst. The story Epstein tells stretches back to the Holocaust that damaged everything in its path. This is a rare narrative, Sherry Turkle has written, ¿in which everyone becomes more human and multi-dimensional as it unfolds.¿

Helen Epstein

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