The Last Letter
A Father's Struggle, A Daughter's Quest and the Long Shadow of the Holocaust
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Narrated by:
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Christa Lewis
About this listen
Born a German Jew in 1915, Rudy Baum was 86 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 88 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.
©2021 The University of Tennessee Press/Knoxville (P)2021 TantorListeners also enjoyed...
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Thanks to her spiteful, jealous Jamaican mother, Nell Vera Lowe was cut off from her Chinese father, Samuel, when she was just a baby, after he announced that he was taking a Chinese bride. By the time Nell was old enough to travel to her father's shop in St. Anne's Bay, he'd taken his family back to China, never learning what became of his eldest daughter. Bereft, Nell left Jamaica for New York to start a new life.
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Fascinating
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The Unanswered Letter
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In August 1939, just days before World War II broke out in Europe, a Jewish man in Vienna named Alfred Berger mailed a desperate letter to a stranger in America who shared his last name. Decades later, journalist Faris Cassell stumbled upon the stunning letter and became determined to uncover the story behind it. How did the American Bergers respond? Did Alfred and his family escape Nazi Germany?
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Wow, what a story and excellent new author!
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Stalin's Daughter
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The award-winning author of Villa Air-Bel returns with a painstakingly researched, revelatory biography of Svetlana Stalin, a woman fated to live her life in the shadow of one of history's most monstrous dictators—her father, Josef Stalin. Born in the early years of the Soviet Union, Svetlana Stalin spent her youth inside the walls of the Kremlin. Communist Party privilege protected her from the mass starvation and purges that haunted Russia, but she did not escape tragedy—the loss of everyone she loved, including her mother, two brothers, aunts and uncles, and a lover twice her age, deliberately exiled to Siberia by her father.
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Insightful and thoroughly researched
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Out of the Depths
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Israel Meir Lau, one of the youngest survivors of Buchenwald, was just eight years old when the camp was liberated in 1945. Descended from a 1,000-year unbroken chain of rabbis, he grew up to become Chief Rabbi of Israel--and like many of the great rabbis, Lau is a master storyteller. Out of the Depths is his harrowing, miraculous, and inspiring account of life in one of the Nazis' deadliest concentration camps, and how he managed to survive against all possible odds.
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Amazing Book, Amazing Man
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Always Remember Your Name
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On March 28, 1944, six-year-old Tati and her four-year-old sister, Andra, were roused from their sleep and arrested. Along with their mother, Mira, their aunt, and cousin Sergio, they were deported to Auschwitz. Over 230,000 children were deported to the camp, where Josef Mengele, the Angel of Death, performed deadly experiments on them. Only a few dozen children survived, Tati and Andra among them.
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Important read!
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Factory Girls
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A book of global significance that provides new insight into China, Factory Girls demonstrates how the mass movement from rural villages to cities is remaking individual lives and transforming Chinese society, much as immigration to America's shores remade our own country a century ago.
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Living in Shenzhen - and What A Disappointment
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In Betty Reid Soskin’s 96 years of living, she has been a witness to a grand sweep of American history. When she was born in 1921, the lynching of African-Americans was a national epidemic, blackface minstrel shows were the most popular American form of entertainment, white women had only just won the right to vote, and most African-Americans in the Deep South could not vote at all. From her great-grandmother, who had been enslaved until her mid-20s, Betty heard stories of slavery and the times of terror and struggle for Black folk that followed.
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How she stressed Creole, but I guess it was a badge if honor not being regular black.
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Enemies of the People
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In this true-life thriller, Kati Marton draws on her skill as an investigative reporter to discover who her journalist parents really were---and how they survived the Nazis in Budapest and imprisonment by the Soviets during the Cold War.
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Couldn't stop listening
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Dancing with the Enemy
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The gripping story of the author's aunt, a Jewish dance instructor who was betrayed to the Nazis by the two men she loved, yet managed to survive WWII by teaching dance lessons to the SS at Auschwitz. Her epic life becomes a window into the author's own past and the key to discovering his Jewish roots.
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Amazing Unique
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Survivor Cafe
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Beyond preserving the firsthand testimonies of participants and witnesses, individuals and societies must continually take responsibility for learning the painful lessons of the past in order to offer hope for the future. Survivor Café offers a clear-eyed sense of the enormity of our 21st-century human inheritance - not only among direct descendants of the Holocaust, but also in the shape of our collective responsibility to learn from tragedy.
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A book every generation should read
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When Time Stopped
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In this remarkably moving memoir Ariana Neumann dives into the secrets of her father’s past: years spent hiding in plain sight in war-torn Berlin, the annihilation of dozens of family members in the Holocaust, and the courageous choice to build anew.
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yesterday as fresh as today
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White like Her
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In the historical context of the Jim Crow South, Gail explores her mother's decision to pass, how she hid her secret even from her own husband, and the price she paid for choosing whiteness. Haunted by her mother's fear and shame, Gail embarks on a quest to uncover her mother's racial lineage, tracing her family back to 18th-century colonial Louisiana. In coming to terms with her decision to publicly out her mother, Gail changed how she looks at race and heritage.
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Disappointed
- By Yoli on 06-06-18
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What listeners say about The Last Letter
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Sandy Horwitz
- 05-28-22
Surviving the surviving
Starting with her Holocaust survivor fathers suicide attempt, Gordon displays and honest and personal account of how she came to terms with her grandparents and parents past.
A true example of how the Holocaust tragedy ripples through the generations. The story was slow at times, filled with historical information, but well worth it to follow her journey
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1 person found this helpful
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- MichaelZ
- 02-06-22
Well worth the listen!
Starting with her grandparents’ letters to her father when they were trapped in Gefmany, the author builds a vivid picture of three generations. Impacted by the Holocaust. She truly brings life to history.!
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1 person found this helpful
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- John Rosenberg
- 09-13-22
Enlightening book
This book provides deeply personal insights into the tragic, gut wrenching circumstances of Jewish families in Germany and the United States prior to and during WWII, and the hidden but profound consequences that followed those who survived.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Blake
- 09-16-22
An Intimate View of the Holocaust and its Impact Through Three Generations
The Last Letter is the intensely personal history of the holocaust and its impact on one family through three generations. The Nazis killed six million Jews across Europe during WWII, and anyone who reads the history of that period is aware of the concentration camps and the images of the horrors. History that big is best told in ways a reader can relate to. The author of this book, Karen Baum Gordon, does just that, as she reveals the perils facing her German Jewish grandparents through their letters in the years of increasing Nazi persecution before the war. She skillfully weaves exerts of these letters to her father, who her grandparents sent to America for his safety, with news of the accelerating hostile actions against the Jewish population in Germany. This is a deeply intimate history of the author’s grandparent’s short journey from being respected business owners, a German veteran of the first world war, raising a family in Hamburg to their fate in a Jewish ghetto in Poland. The book is part family history, part world history and part detective story as the author tells us of her own journey to connect the life father while discovering what happened to her grandparents after their final letter to him and retrace their steps in their last months, victims of Hitler’s “final solution.” The audio book is beautifully enhanced by the narration of Christa Lewis, whose knowledge of German and expertly chosen inflections and voices could not have provided a more perfect narration for the author’s beautifully crafted words. This book is the best kind of history, intimate, relatable and riveting from page to page.
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- Kay Bear
- 07-28-22
The Holocaust's effect on future Genertion's of
Very good novel about a families search for peace, the Holocaust. Finding letters from her grandparents to her father. After her father died, and the work she did to find the truth.
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- Laci Riggs
- 05-23-22
beautiful story but rather dull
I was unable to finish this story because, honestly, I got bored. I'm obsessed with this Era and was so sad that it couldn't keep my attention. it's a beautiful story though. I hope you enjoy it better than I did!
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- Nancy Ann Dickey
- 03-07-24
The author rambles on and on……
The subject matter was from a different perspective than other holocaust books, but this poor little book needs a good editor.
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