Reviewing: “Unearthed: A Lost Actress, a Forbidden Book, and a Search for Life in the Shadow of the Holocaust” by Meryl Frank. Hachette Books. 2023. English. Hardcover. 256 pages. ISBN-13: 978-0306828362.
The invitation I received announced that Meryl Frank would be having a book launch and reception, co-sponsored by the Friends of the Highland Park Library. The community event took place in the heart of the borough where Frank previously served as mayor. The author read selections from her recently released nonfiction book, “Unearthed: A Lost Actress, a Forbidden Book, and a Search for Life in the Shadow of the Holocaust.”
If you look up Meryl Frank on Wikipedia, you’ll find an impressive resume of many of her accomplishments, including three master’s degrees from Rutgers and Yale. The entry reads: “Frank helped author legislation for President Bill Clinton, including the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993, and for New Jersey Governor Thomas Kean. She was the mayor of Highland Park, New Jersey from 2000 to 2010.
“In 2009, President Barack Obama appointed Frank to represent the United States at the Fifth World Conference on Women. In 2010, Obama appointed her ambassador to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women.”
Her achievements to date are impressive and now she has another: the publication of an account of her family in Europe during the time of the Holocaust, “Unearthed.” (Deborah Melman reviewed the book in the March 23 Jewish Link article “A Journey to the Past,” bit.ly/42gThp3.)
Frank has taken eight years to document the life and death of her cousin, Franya Winter, a shining star in the pre-war Yiddish Theater of Vilna, Lithuania. The city is now known as Vilnius. The search took her on a journey through Europe and several archives and sources, in order to preserve the memory of her murdered family.
At the book launch, Frank, with the assistance of two daughters, read three selections from her family’s history. The book chronicles a family mystery that would take years to solve. Frank admitted, “I knew nothing about my family’s struggle for survival after the city of Vilna, where many of them resided, was invaded in the summer of 1941, and nothing about the circumstances of their death.” She cited her “Aunt Mollie’s unspoken decision to designate me as my generation’s keeper of the family memory. This role is known as ‘the memorial candle,’ or yahrzeit.”
Over the next 12 chapters, Frank unravels the twists and turns that enable her to get a better picture of what happened to Franya and the rest of the family. And as she relates, telling her family’s story to her children was as important as answering her own questions of what happened to her family.
In addition to the book launch in Highland Park, Frank has been keeping extremely busy. The day before she spoke in Asbury Park. On the eve of Yom HaShoah, ABC-TV news in Philadelphia ran an interview with her on the evening news. She was a guest on VoiceAmerica.com, and spoke at a session co-sponsored by The Forward, The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and The Center for Jewish History. She will appear at the Montclair Literary Festival on May 6 and at the IAJGS Jewish Genealogy Conference in London later in the summer.
Her mission to remember and keep the memory of her family alive and add to the collective history of the Jewish experience in Europe has been accomplished with the publication of this very moving memoir.
Meryl Frank’s book is available from several websites, including Amazon.
Milton Erdfarb, the son of two Holocaust survivors, lives with his wife, Deborah, in Highland Park. They are active members of Congregation Ahavas Achim.
