When the river ice flows, I will come home: a memoir

"Her career involved working in Russia's far eastern north, home of Stalin's gulag, in the same Russia from which all her grandparents had fled.

This alone was unusual. In addition, this work overwhelmed her family life, making her unavailable (and inaccessible) as mother, as wife.

Yet she was absolutely driven to this for reasons she comes to discover.

When the River Ice Flows, I Will Come Home tells the story of Elisa's discovery of a cache of letters written in Russian and in Yiddish that her father had saved and she found after his death.

The story those letters told helped her to link the shape and character of her life to those who had gone before in ways she understood for the very first time"--.