Share

Tweet

Share

Share

Email

Comments

IsraelSeen Exclusive: PLAYING DETECTIVE WITH FAMILY LORE

 

A Fascinating Read—Just Published!

 

Back in October 2020 when 75 year-old Daniella Weiss Ashkenazy (born in the USA, who immigrated to Israel in 1968 in her early twenties) landed in an Israeli hospital with Covid. Waiting for two life-saving plasma IVs to arrive from the blood bank, as her oxygen saturation continued to fall she was filled with foreboding that ‘the cavalry would arrive too late’. She’d been told there was a “narrow window” in the virus’ progression when this therapy works. She pondered whether her book Playing Detective with Family Lore—embarked on in 2003 and finally in the publication stages—would be released in her absence, with an additional page at the front:

 

“This book is dedicated to the author who died in the Covid pandemic, 102 years after her grandfather Michael Schwarzer succumbed to the 1918 Spanish Flu.”

 

But, Ashkenazy survived. And the book has just been released—available on Amazon as an eBook, and in paperback format, at https://www.amazon.com/Playing-Detective-Family-Lore-unintentionally/dp/9657041163/.

 

Playing Detective – a family saga-turned-social history—is hardly dry. Even the whimsical cover art reflects this. The author is a well-published veteran journalist. She not only shares with her readers aspects of the lives and times of the four branches of her family from very different places and circumstances in Eastern Europe who came to America at the outset of the 20^th century, then captures the essence of her parents Gil and Pearl Weiss and their generation who made the quantum leap of so many from tenement living to the American middle class – including the challenges they faced. The work is well seasoned with piquant side excursions about people and places and the tenor of the times that make the narrative a page-turner—a family saga well-told. Not only that.

 

Ashkenazy puts the reader in the backseat of her oft ‘rollercoaster-like’ research as she set out to solve enigmas and throw light on hidden corners in her family’s history, connecting the dots using not only archival sources spoken of in countless genealogy books, but also employing her skills as a journalist and the logic of a Sherlock Holmes with plenty of “Watson, it’s elementary!” moments.

 

What human dynamics were really behind the breakdown in communication between the rich Other Schwarzers and her mother Pearl’s family—thrust into poverty after Michael Schwartzer’s untimely death in 1918? Who was the person in whose memory she was named, after he fell in the Spanish Civil War—all she knew was his first name—and could she find this ‘David’ 80 years after he died?  Did great-grandfather Jacob Reiter really “forget about his four young orphaned kids” still in Europe “when he went off and married the widow Rosa Raubfogel to start a new family” as oral family history held? These and other nagging questions were faced head-on, once Ashkenazy switched hats—from ‘daughter of’ writing solely a memoir that would be a nostalgic and oft humorous trip down memory lane like countless other memoir writers (yes, there’s a bit of that, too), to ‘journalist’ seeking a more complex truth in her family’s legacy. It makes for a riveting read on a host of levels.

 

More about the book and the author—with excerpts, on the website playingdetective.com.