Helen Epstein, wrote the ground-breaking book "Children of the Holocaust" It is the first book to deal with second generation and post-traumatic stress syndrome in children of Holocaust survivors. Epstein is the author of five books of non-fiction, including "Where She Came From: A Daughter's Search for her Mother's History," a family memoir and social history of 200 years of Czech Jewish life, begun while Epstein was a visiting scholar at Harvard University's Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies in 1982. She is also the translator from the Czech of Heda Kovaly's award-winning "Under a Cruel Star: A Life in Prague." Born in Prague in 1947, Epstein became a journalist while an undergraduate caught in the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. For the next 25 years, she worked as a freelance cultural reporter for the Sunday New York Times and other national publications, writing profiles of such figures as Leonard Bernstein, Meyer Schapiro and Joseph Papp. Her profiles of classical musicians have been collected in the book "Music Talks." The first tenured woman professor in New York University's Department of Journalism, she has taught writing since 1974 and guest lectures frequently on trauma, memoir, and family history.

Posted: 05/05/2005