Honors in the Arts Cohort 2016-17

Families are people connected by blood and history. Beyond Red Waters, a work that is at once memoir, history, illness narrative and biography, will tell the story of two generations of Ehrlich women—my grandmother and me, illuminating how suffering and survival impacted my family over three generations. It will explore how history unspoken can consume while trauma shared can heal. My grandmother’s suffering in the Holocaust left ripples that shaped my father’s life in mid-century America and his destructive reaction to my mysterious illness almost fifty years later. His fury at being unable to help his sick child, an anger inherited from the suffering and helplessness of his parents, boiled over in our home with a searing heat that I couldn’t understand—a fire inherited from his home in which so much had been lost but nothing was ever spoken of.

Beyond Red Waters will weave together the narratives of my grandmother’s survival as a Jew in Nazi occupied Europe—becoming “the other” in the town of her birth—and my inexplicable chronic illness—bringing an all consuming isolation in contemporary New England. As my teenage body betrayed me, and my grandmother’s gave way to old age, we communed via letters over loss and survival. Combining creative writing, history, Jewish studies, and narrative medicine, my vision is a book that transcends conventional genres of suffering to show that how legacies of pain forge strength to survive the impossible. This book will explore how the love and connection of a family engenders the strength to survive when one’s body, community, and very life is threatened beyond imagination.