The Last Letter

A Father's Struggle, A Daughter's Quest and the Long Shadow of the Holocaust

By: Karen Baum Gordon

Narrated by: Christa Lewis

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 Tantor

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.!

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

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.