30 May 2009

Michigan: Erin Einhorn to speak, June 7

Journalist Erin Einhorn, author of The Pages In Between, will speak at the annual meeting of the Jewish Genealogical Society of Michigan (JGSMI) on Sunday, June 7.

The meeting, which includes installation of new officers and a dessert reception, begins at 1.30pm at the
Holocaust Memorial Center, 28123 Orchard Lake Rd., Farmington Hills. There is a fee.

When Einhorn found the family that hid her mother from the Nazis during WWII she thought she'd created a made-for-TV-reunion for two families thrown together by history. A man who had known her mother as a child embraced Erin and told her that her mother had been like a sister to him.

But the initial embrace soon gave way to 50 years of hurt feelings and resentments. Erin was apologizing for choices made years before she was born, untangling a real estate deal made on a handshake by people long gone. She found herself struggling to prove the death of a great-grandfather born in 1868. Then, as she confronted the circumstances of her family's tragic past, unexpected events in her own life altered her mission completely.

A Detroit native who lives in New York City, Einhorn is a reporter for the New York Daily News, and has also written for the Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia Daily News and Fortune Magazine. She is a contributor to National Public Radio's This American Life. Einhorn's story was the basis for one of the show's most popular episodes.

For fees, additional details and reservations, click on the JGSMI site.

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