Dear Lizzie »

Leona Tamarkin recounts her ordeal as a Jewish refugee during the First World War and her life as a young immigrant in America after 1920. Tamarkin's narrative rings with determination, will to live, and boldness, even within confining circumstances. First conveyed as a letter from a grandmother to her then fifteen-year-old granddaughter, Lizzie, the memoir offers a story too painful to say out loud but too important to be left unsaid. More than simply a family story, Tamarkin's written words bring immediacy and humanity to distant historical events.

Author Biography: Born in 1905 in Brest Litovsk, Poland, Leona Tamarkin emigrated to the United States in 1920. She moved back and forth between New York and St. Louis, before settling down in St. Louis, marrying Joseph B. Tamarkin, and raising five children: Allan, Pamela, Maurry, Stanley, and Sasha. After her husband died in 1960, Leona learned to play chess and subsequently won the Midwestern Women's Chess Championship in 1968. She now lives in New Haven, Connecticut. Leona's oldest grandchild, Elizabeth "Lizzie" Reis teaches history at the University of Oregon. She is the author of Damned Women: Sinners and Witches in Puritan New England (1997) and the editor of Spellbound: Women and Witchcraft in America (1998) and American Sexual Histories (2001).