Weaving the Threads of Time and Memory
A memoir ultimately without a time and ultimately without a place. It’s a story of families across generations of peace and of war, of homes that become lost and hopes that are kept, and a belief in a future that’s better than the present.
About the Book
The memoir is a compelling and exhilarating experience exploring the threads of times now long gone and the memories that arose from them to generate the stories that lived on. In each family, a fundamental life event spawns ripples that sweep across time and generations that would fade forever without exploration and would otherwise shed all meaning.
The key event in many lives is making the decision to leave home forever and to strike out not knowing if it leads to disaster or to a future and a better place. So many today around the world face the same uncertain decision – to stay or to go.
RELEASED ON 27 JANUARY 2021, INTERNATIONAL HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE DAY.
Endorsements
The Story Keeper by Fred Feldman is an incredibly compelling memoir that explores how past experiences can shape a family even generations after. The book begins with a Jewish refugee and his family's desperate plight to find a new home after the Germans occupied Sokolow, their beloved hometown. Fleeing into Soviet territory, Mendel's small family became his only constant as they bounced from place to place in hopes of finding a haven from the gruesome war. Several imprisonments later, Mendel and his family found a forever home in America where his son, Fred Feldman, would eventually find purpose in keeping their story alive and inspire hope for others in the same situation.
As we are overwhelmed with the news of Syria's refugee crisis, The Story Keeper is an incredibly fitting story for the modern-day reader looking for insight into a refugee's plight of survival. Fred Feldman shone a light on the unjust treatment of the Jews by the Russians and Germans alike. Reading this novel opened my eyes to a refugee's struggle and reminded me that even though I may not personally be affected or know someone who is, I should not turn a blind eye to their struggle as all human beings deserve a safe place to call home. Fred did an incredible job describing how his parents' past struggles have impacted his experience of living in America. By including maps and photos of his family, I found myself inevitably pulled into the story. With a heartwarming message, this book is a must-read!
– Cassie Widjaja
A family’s escape and ordeal; dramatic, powerful, palpable.
– Larry Cann; MA
A moving testimony to resilience and devotion across continents and generations, reclaiming family history that was nearly lost to the darkness of the Holocaust.
– Susan Abrams, Chief Executive Officer, Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center
Gives voice to all those who, today, suffer and strive for just a place they can call home and can raise their children in peace.
– Joseph T. Kelley; CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF JEWISH-CHRISTIAN-MUSLIM RELATIONS; Professor, Merrimac College, MA
Refugees - The Story Keeper is their story; powerful and poignant, you will shed tears.
– Sherry Cann; MA
The book is wonderful and moved me greatly as it reminds me of all the lives that were destroyed or changed by the Holocaust. All survivors have amazing stories to tell and the author’s parents and family can thank him for memorializing their story. The Feldman family’s names, are my family’s names. Their stories are my family’s stories. Mendel and Freyde asked “Do I stay or do I go?” a question millions of Jews during the Holocaust asked and the decision altered their lives forever. Let us never forget those stories and live in this world to make it a better place for the generations to come.
– Sam Tramiel, Owner, Tramiel Capital, Inc., former head Atari
Fred Feldman is the person who set out to build a bridge between the past and the present. He meticulously searched for traces of his family history, recreated the life of a small town in eastern Poland, while trying to learn more about himself. His journey has not only geographic dimension, but it is also about getting to know himself better. Perhaps it will inspire other people to do similar research. It's worth doing it!
– Katarzyna Markusz, Editor-in-chief at Jewish.pl; journalist, Sokolow Podlaski Jewish History
Fred Feldman has written a remarkable book that weaves together two intimately connected journeys. The first was forced upon his young parents in 1939 by the Nazis, who invaded Mendel and Freyde’s native Poland. The second was embarked on a half-century ago by their son—who became a successful scientist and a corporate executive and who is now well into retirement—to reconstruct his parents’ harrowing escape from Hitler’s clutches; to discover the fate of his parents’ extended families in Europe, the United States, and Israel; and to celebrate his parents’ determination to build a new life for their children in South Bend, Indiana. A memoir of heartbreak and hope, of Nazi barbarism and Jewish fortitude, of struggle and accomplishment in a new land of freedom and opportunity, The Story Keeper above all tells a gripping tale stretching across decades of a son’s deepening understanding of, and gratitude for, his parents’ love and courage.
– Peter Berkowitz, Tad and Dianne Taube Senior Fellow Hoover Institution, Stanford University
Through a careful reconstruction of his family's history, from his parents' experiences during the Holocaust to the generations that have followed them, Feldman traces how the past continues to speak to the present. Drawing a parallel between the horror of the Holocaust and the genocides and exiles in today's world, this thought-provoking memoir allows Feldman's own family history to serve as a reminder of the need for justice and peace today.
– Emma O'Donnell Polyakov, author of The Nun in the Synagogue: Judeocentric Catholicism in Israel
“Do I stay or do I leave?” With this poignant question, Fred Feldman begins the story of his family’s flight from Nazi horrors. The story of their long journey to safety and freedom is not only a challenge never to forget the Holocaust. Dr. Feldman recalls the past in a way that opens up the reader to the present. His narrative calls us to remember the more than 70 million displaced persons around the world today. His story gives a voice to “all those who, today, suffer and strive for just a place they can call home and a place where they can raise their children in peace.
– Joseph T. Kelley, Ph.D., D.Min., Professor of Religious and Theological Studies, Center for the Study of Jewish-Christian-Muslim Relations, Merrimack College, Massachusetts
The Storykeeper is not just a telling of Fred Feldman's family Holocaust story, but a a true-to-life, exquisitely detailed story depicting the qualities of strength, determination, resilience, honor, love, sacrifice and integrity carried from generation to generation. Even the next generation of little children in this family continues to show honor and respect to those who came before, thanks to Fred's determined commitment to elicit so many details of an undocumented history. Reading this book makes you feel as if you are living it with his family - in Poland, on foot to Eastern Europe, Russia, back to Eastern Europe, Poland and DP camps, as well as in Israel, and in America. It is a story of a family torn apart from its roots, each other, and its home in Poland. Those who survived the Holocaust amazingly come to reconfigure in a very different world in the US and Israel. When people say, "the past is the past," this book tells us otherwise. We have only to see the world today, 2021, to see that prejudice, hatred, and intimidation have reared their ugly heads all over the world; and that there are still seekers who are willing to sacrifice so much for a better life. And there are still families like the Feldmans who seek to learn from their past.
– Sharyn Russell
If you were told today: escape NOW. Forever. Leave everyone and everything behind. What would you do?
This book is about real people who have shown incredible courage, determination and resilience beyond anyone’s imagination. They endured hell on earth, and it did not end with the war.
It is a MUST read, learn and remember. It can happen to anyone.
– Teresa Pollin, Retired Archivist from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington DC
The 20th was the century of refugees. This is the story of Mendel and Freyda, two Polish Jews fleeting the advancing Nazis into the depths of the Soviet Union. But it transmits a universal truth, with two humans representing millions. After a massacre of Jews near Riga, the historian Simon Dubnov cried out to the witnesses: “Schreibt un farschreibt!” – write and record! Fred Feldman honored this duty with gripping tale of terror and redemption. He is “The Story Keeper” for generations to come. This not just history at its best, but an ode to life.
– Josef Joffe, Distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University; publisher/editor of the German weekly 'Die Zeit'
Dr. Feldman is a classic scientist who has taken a clinical approach to a very personal journey, revealing a heart of compassion in a story of love and discovery. All of us wonder about how we got here, and Feldman’s chronicle gives us hope.
– Patrick Morand, Kalamazoo, Michigan
I just spent the last two days reading the book and was mesmerized. The dedication to the author’s family history, details and accuracy were inspiring as was the love he felt for his family and their stories. It always amazes me when I read these historical searches how much information is available when a person takes the time to find it. Great job.
– Auggie Tomanovich
Fred Feldman is indeed the Story Keeper. He acknowledges being "obsessed" with his family's story of life and death in Sokolow, Poland, where most of its Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. His detailed account of how his father Mendel and mother Frieda survived is spellbinding. They faced horrendous difficulties tearing themselves away from their families, staying ahead of the Germans, going deep into Russia, down to the Baltic, back to Azerbaijan (where Fred was born), and then emaciated and with two children to the DP camps in Austria, because Sokolow's Jews had all been killed, including Mendel's mother and siblings. Also moving is his account of how Mendel and Frieda get to America and manage to build a peaceful and productive life in Indiana, with successful and happy children and grandchildren.
Unusual though is Fred's shift of focus from these exciting but conventional dramas to the details of his quest for the details of his family's story - every branch, every person lost or saved, and the photos and stories, each of which he calls a "treasure". Over several years, for example, he collects numerous versions of how his aunt Rojza (age 21) runs away from Sokolow to Israel (becoming Shosanna) and eventually how he settles on a version that accommodates all the apparently conflicting details. Fred's relatives participate in his quest but warn that no one but his own family will be interested in such an in-depth examination. Fred insists, though, that his particular family's history is a "story ultimately without a time and ultimately without a place."
Fred is right. The far-reaching purpose of his particularized search becomes credible as the evidence he collects is integrated by the Holocaust Museum into a collection reflecting, not only what happened to the six million Jews killed during the war, but also to the horrors still being inflicted on many more millions of people. His quest to learn every fact related to his family's experience in the most incomprehensible injustice of modern history exemplifies the universal search for understanding of man's inhumanity to man, and of how to survive and overcome that inhumanity.
– Abraham D. Sofaer has been the George P. Shultz Senior Fellow in Foreign Policy and National Security Affairs at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, since 1994, and is now emeritus.
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