A Hidden Life: A Memoir of August 1969 by Johanna Reiss

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It is 1969, and Johanna Reiss has been convinced by her husband, Jim, to revisit Holland, where she was born, and then to write a memoir of her childhood. It is to be a seven week trip, with Jim planning to join the family a little later on. We are informed that Johanna followed through, returning to the U.S. to write what was to become an awardwinning memoir.

Nobody knew that those planned sunny, warming moments with the Oosterveld family would be suddenly cut into, scalpel-like, by a phone call from her husband’s brother in the States shouting into Johanna’s ordered world that her husband has committed suicide.

Full review at Jewish Book Council