Thursday, March 12
Noon
Klara’s Truth: A Novel by Susan Weissbach Friedman
Facilitator: Susie Weiner
It is May 2014, and Dr. Klara Lieberman—forty-nine, single, professor of archaeology at a small liberal arts college in Maine—has just received a letter from her estranged mother, Bessie. Her father, she learns—the man who has been absent from her life for the last forty-three years—is dead. But now the Polish government is giving financial reparations for land it stole from its Jewish citizens during WWII, and Bessie wants the money. Klara has little interest in the money—but she does want answers about her father. She flies to Warsaw, determined to learn more.
In Poland, Klara begins to piece together her father’s, and her own, story. She also connects with extended family, begins a romantic relationship, and discovers her calling: repairing the hundreds of forgotten, and mostly destroyed, pre-War Jewish cemeteries in Poland. Along the way, she finds the tools to make peace with her past and, for the first time in her life, build purposefully toward a bigger future.
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