Letter from the Publisher
At the start of summer, I had the opportunity to share a family reunion with my brother David and his family, my aunt Lucy, and my wife, Deborah. in Bulgaria. Lucy and my mother, Betty (deceased), grew up in Sofia before and during World War II. None of us except Lucy had ever been to Eastern Europe – it was a time to explore our roots and share a week of exploration and stories. It was amazing to see the apartment building that Lucy and Betty and our grandparents lived in during the war very much intact, gleaming, and well kept up. My mother’s family was obliged to wear the Jewish star on their clothes and would have been deported to a Polish camp in 1943 except for the intervention of the Bulgarian king, the speaker of the parliament, and the bishop of the Eastern Orthodox Church. Instead they were transported to a ghetto encampment 100 miles away. After Bulgaria was liberated by Russia in 1945, they returned to Sofia and reclaimed their apartment. However, Communist authorities would once again take away my grandfather’s property and the family decided to emigrate. My mother met my father, Jerome, in Sofia in 1947 during a UN mission to investigate Communism, married, and returned to New York, where David and I grew up. Lucy and my grandparents emigrated to Istanbul and then in 1950 settled in Tel Aviv, where Lucy still lives.
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