Braided Generations: The Living, the Lost, and the Power of Belonging

Braided Generations brings to life several generations of two immigrant American clans, the author’s and that of her late husband, Harry Gottlieb Jr. As a child, Jean Stern heard her parents’ and grandparents’ stories of surviving pogroms and struggling to reach America. Not till adulthood, however, did she learn of the family’s suicides; in Jewish tradition, their names were never spoken. When a grandnephew asked to know more about his ancestors, this memoir was born, mingling memory and research to enfold those lost ones-and Harry’s-back into the family story.

Harry Gottlieb’s grandfather, Abraham, was Daniel Burnham’s contentious engineer in Devil in the White City; Harry’s war-doomed brother was Eleanor Roosevelt’s protege. Jean’s childhood was chilled by the Great Depression and anti-Semitism; great musicians, her lawyer father’s clients-Horowitz, Milstein-ate at their family table. Prohibition, backstreet abortion, Pearl Harbor: history looms, and on it this tale is woven.