For the past six years I’ve been intensively writing a memoir about my search for my birth mother, entitled Me and My Makers: A Memoir About Genes, Adoption, and Love. I’m doing this Jewcer funding campaign so you can be a part of this amazing project and support an artist’s work as I prepare the book for submission to prospective publishers.
This memoir is about “my makers” – my four origins, from nature and nurture . The photos above are of my parents, Rachel and Robert, and of my birth mother, Susan and my birth father, Leon. To see them all here together moves me. This memoir is a story of braiding nature and nurture, like a double helix memory. By supporting my project you too are being braided into this community of rememberers who refuse to forget.
It is a L’chaim for the extraordinary lives my ancestors lived, and for how they continue to live in me, making their memory for a blessing. I warmly invite your collegial support, so that you too, through your contribution, will have a place in this story about memory-come-alive and genealogical reckoning.
In 2019, I reluctantly stepped into the Genealogy Zone to find my birth mother so my daughter can have a grandparent. I unearth two Holocaust lineages and learn that my birth mother was born in the only Jewish internment camp in the US during WWII.
Spanning generations, and populated by ghosts, children, and captivating characters, I give birth to an intergenerational saga that is a DNA double helix of nature and nurture, love and loss, memory and imagination. My relentless, increasingly obsessive drive to find my birth mother creates a portrait of family, but also of what it means to learn I come from a lineage of artistic, Jewish women who were silenced, deemed psychotic, and institutionalized.
Of course, it takes a village to give birth to a book worth saving and savoring and I believe Me and My Makers is such a book. This will inspire you, your children and grand children to write and to remember your ancestors. What could be more important?
Where Your Support Goes:
My search became a detective story combined with an adoption story, combined with a Holocaust story. I have 4 main tasks to accomplish in this final stage of writing and editing:
#1) Return to Oswego, NY, to do further research in the Safe Haven archive of the Fort Ontario Emergency Refugee Shelter. I discovered that my birth mother was born in the only Jewish internment camp in North America Feb. 10, 1945. Estimated expenses (including travel, car rental, hotel: ($1600)
#2) I need to hire and work with a professional editor and this is costly. ($3900)
#3) I was accepted into the prestigious and highly competitive (and costly) Kenyon Review’s Summer Writer’s Residency. This will cost about $3500 including transportation.
#4) Once I find a publisher, I will want to hire a publicist to market the book ($2000)
Organizations/Social Justice I will be supporting
Artists Against Antisemitism: https://www.theartistsagainstantisemitism.com/
Maternal Mental Health Leadership Alliance (MMHLA) https://www.mmhla.org/donate
The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS)
“On the whole, it is a very smart, very beautiful, very sad, very sexy book. Elegant, graceful and strong. Underneath there is a current of longing and melancholy which is matched by a shimmering transcendence, as your ancestors of nurture and your ancestors of nature equally love, suffer and dance with you, and through you with your reader. I am a better person for having read it – and I am already intimate with your story, so it is not so much the impact of the narrative, which I already know, as the attractiveness of the vessel through which your narrative is born to your audience.”
– Ed Callahan, PhD, University of Chicago Divinity School
