Hope to see you in California.

My second book, the one on the death train and my journey as a teacher in discovering and retracing the miracles in reuniting Holocaust survivors with their American soldier liberators, has had mostly positive reviews at Amazon. Then recently someone posted how he found himself resenting that I had clumsily inserted my own experiences into an otherwise tremendous story. (Fair enough—but 'resentment'?) That, coupled with a resurgence of antisemitism and the other stuff that bad dreams are made of sends a certain chill up this writer's—this historian's—spine. Now if one really read, and 'got' the point of my second book, it's about miracles and goodness and common human decency and humanity; about a triumph of the power of good and love over evil, against crazy odds; about the lessons and the values which we should hold firm to in a world filled with pain and destruction, deception and deceit. But some days it is hard to see the good, and the world lately frankly leaves me feeling rather adrift; I wonder if it all is pointless.

And then, out of the blue, comes the quiet reminder...

Later this week I got an email from a new fan in Salt Lake City, Utah. We have never met or heard of each other until he bought my books at Amazon. He loved them, and then felt compelled to reach out to me (which I invite—it's matthew@teachinghistorymatters.com). He wrote that as he neared the end of the book, he realized that his wife was from the area where I live and write about. We went back and forth. Later on a whim he reached up on the bookshelf in his basement office and dusted off his wife's high school yearbook. He opened it up, and sent me this:

IT'S MY MOM.

Vintage 1975, autographing his wife's graduating yearbook... turns out my mom was the school nurse teacher at his wife's school, now nearly a continent away. Kim was heading out west after graduation, and my mother was going to head there to visit her brother and his family in California that summer. Neither I nor my siblings have ever seen this photo before; I can tell by her expression that Mom is laughing with the photographer and is insisting that he get the shot over with! So now, on a dark day, my mother is speaking to me. She was taken from us since just before the Holocaust survivors I write about found me in 2006 and entered my life and the lives of the soldiers who freed them in such a profound way. My mother reaches out  to remind me that there is still good in the world. Maybe that reviewer could care less, but my mom will always be a part of the story—MY story. Thanks, William, for sending it to me. And thanks Ma, for being there for me again.