"Miriam Dobin, a beloved preschool teacher, has written a moving account of her life as a child of Holocaust survivors. Raised by a loving aunt and uncle, also survivors, while her mother struggled with illness and her father worked long days, she grew up and, finding a perfect match, raised a family of her own. Dobin feels deeply that her story carries forward the history of her people, her culture and her religion, a project accomplished with deep caring and immense love. Her tale of a family that barely survived annihilation crosses the generations, entwining stories of her parents and grandparents with those of her own children. It climaxes in a trip to Slovakia and western Ukraine, where she and her husband meet people who remember her family. Past and future converge when her newborn granddaughter is given the name Esther after Dobin's beloved aunt. This family saga is enriched with first person accounts and photographs, maps, and documents in several Eastern European languages and English translation. The reader will want to follow Dobin's links to YouTube to view some of that material as well as other video clips she has posted in conjunction with her memoir. This is a multifaceted project well done."
About the Author: Miriam Dobin is married with three children and has worked as an Early Childhood educator for over 20 years. She graduated Yeshiva University Stern College for Women with a degree in Education and received her certification as Teacher of the Handicapped from Kean University. She is a licensed teacher in the State of New Jersey. Miriam currently serves as the Head Teacher in the Early Childhood division of a local school. Miriam has taught Holocaust studies to middle school students and is deeply committed to furthering knowledge of this period in history. Upon the death of her beloved aunt, Miriam promised herself that the time had come to write the family history. Her task took her deep into the family records and half way around the world to the places where her parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins lived before they were imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps and where almost all of them were killed. Miriam was raised not only by her two parents but also by her aunt and uncle, all four of them survivors. Together these four individuals reared a child who, for them, embodied a future that they could hardly have believed would ever come. Miriam's life is a living legacy to the strength and perseverance of these four individuals, who together instilled in Miriam a strong sense of responsibility and commitment to Jewish life, family and continuity.