Seeking a Common Thread is a coming-of-age novel that takes the reader back and forth in time to Vienna of the 1920s and 1930s, where we meet Lusia Spielvogel, to Connecticut in 1972, where we meet Susan, a fifteen year-old-teenager. All her life, Susan had wondered what was inside the trunk that had always stood in the corner of her family's dining room. Susan's father, Samuel, is secretive and never speaks of the relatives he lost in the Holocaust. There has been a break in the strand of family, and Susan feels no connection to those relatives who were lost. Samuel and his immediate family had lived in Vienna and remained there for a year after the Anschluss. He was able to escape to Ireland through the sponsorship of a Righteous Gentile named Florence Hobson. Samuel's Tante Lusia and Onkel Jakob were not as lucky. They had packed away a trunk filled with their possessions in anticipation of a future life in freedom; a future that was never to be. Once the family opens up the trunk to reveal its contents, Susan tries to get to know the mysterious "woman of the trunk" through her possessions. Susan discovers a halfway completed embroidered tablecloth among the items in the trunk. A project started, never to be completed by its original owner. The narrative of Seeking a Common Thread interweaves Lusia's story with Susan's completion of the unfinished tablecloth and how, through the act of embroidery to complete the project, Susan discovers Tante Lusia's story and and in turn discovers herself and a connection to family. The author's father, Samuel, was an eyewitness to the Anschluss and the rise of the Nazis in Austria. The author's grandfather, David Spielvogel, was an inmate in Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps. The narrative of Seeking a Common thread is based on the objects found inside Lusia's trunk, the author's father's testimony and incorporates letters from his personal collection.
About the Author: Susan Spielvogel was born in New Haven, Connecticut where she graduated from Hopkins School. She is a graduate of Barnard College/Columbia University where she majored in Art History. All her life, Ms. Spielvogel had wondered what was inside the trunk which stood in her family's dining room. In 1972, at the age of fifteen, the trunk was opened to reveal its contents. Aspiring to be a writer since the age of four, Ms. Spielvogel was inspired to write The Trunk Triology when she began to ask her father, Samuel, those hard questions about the fate of the trunk's owners. Ms. Spielvogel's father had lived in Vienna with his parents and his sister, Elsa, until he was eighteen when the Nazis invaded in 1938. By a quirk of history, the family was split between America and Austria. During the summer of 2000, Ms. Spielvogel travelled to Vienna and Antwerp to research locations from her family's past. Using original photographs, documents and letters from her family's archives, the author began to write The Trunk Trilogy. Although Ms. Spielvogel never had the chance to meet Tante Lusia, the "woman of the trunk," she was fortunate enough to meet and get to know her grandmother, Eva, who lived in Vienna. She was also fortunate enough to be in contact through correspondence with Florence Hobson, the Righteous Gentile from Ireland who rescued her father in 1939. Seeking a Common Thread, the first book in The Trunk Trilogy interweaves the story of Susan, the story of Tante Lusia, the "woman of the trunk" and how through the items in the trunk, Susan discovers a connection to family and a sense of self. The narrative of Connecting Threads, Book Two of The Trunk Trilogy (release date TBA) goes back and forth in time as the reader follows Susan as she accompanies her father on a trip to Vienna during the summer of 1972. The narrative then goes back in time to 1938, when Susan's grandmother, Eva, must choose between fleeing Vienna with her daughter, Elsa, or attempting the unthinkable, trying to free her husband, David who has been arrested and transported to Dachau. Over the course of the narrative, Susan learns the real fate of her grandfather. Book Three of The Trunk Trilogy, Celtic Knot, (release date TBA) intertwines the story of Florence Hobson, and Susan's experiences as she retruns to school in the Fall after her summer trip to Vienna. Ms. Spielvogel has now become the caretaker for Tante Lusia's trunk and its contents.