Buried Rivers: A Spiritual Journey into the Holocaust

Triple Award Winner, including Silver Nautilus Book Award and Independent Publisher Bronze Medal for Memoir, and Next Generation Book Award Finalist for Spirituality

To the chagrin of her parents, Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust, the author became a Buddhist at 19, nearly tearing her family apart. Decades later, on a German train, she felt the presence of spirits who had died in the Holocaust. Their question, "How can you still believe in basic goodness?" sent her on a series of life-changing journeys to Poland to find the answer. Would her years of Buddhist meditation finally prove helpful to her lineage instead of being a betrayal?

In 2006, the author first travels to Poland, the Holocaust's largest graveyard, and to her mother's city of Łódź, to reconnect with her family's tragic history while exploring basic goodness, not theoretically, but in her body and heart. With no living elders to consult, she relies on an account dictated by her uncle, an Auschwitz survivor, before his death for clues to the past.

As she retraces her mother's and uncle's steps through Europe, and walks in the places where ancestors walked for centuries, she stumbles into a mysterious stream of love—if only she can receive it. Aware of traumatic imprints, she realizes that helping the dead is inseparable from healing her own wounds; and that opening to events previously hidden, and darkness itself, brings a transformation that widens our perception and changes us forever.

Beyond recovering a lost family history, this riveting narrative reveals connections between spirituality and trauma, Judaism and Buddhism; and intimately explores family loyalty, religious boundaries, and the magical blessings of ancestors. A courageous and uplifting 2nd-generation Holocaust memoir.

Approx. length: 92,000 words