Sailing In Kansas

SAILING IN KANSAS: AN AMERICAN JEWISH MEMOIR, by Kathy Green, is published by White Poppy Press. A unique American Jewish memoir, it is at once the story of her own childhood in Leavenworth, Kansas, and an account of her father Siegfried Ernst Held, an upper-class Berlin Jew (and avid sailor) who wound up in Leavenworth in the course of flight from Germany in the 1930’s. It is thus a meeting of two very different corners of the Jewish diaspora and the ways in which they lived side-by-side in a child’s imagination. The book opens with her trip “back” to Berlin, many years after her father’s death, and her reflections on that journey.

SAILING IN KANSAS is a touching story of childhood in the context of extended family and a historic but small, dying Jewish community. It is also the tale of a thoughtful adolescent’s confrontation with illness and death, faith and destiny. It concludes with the story of how Kathy eventually outgrew and left Leavenworth, becoming a Jewish intellectual and educator, based in Philadelphia and Boston.

Kathy Green taught Jewish Education at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in Philadelphia. She previously authored The Jewish Family Book, co-edited with Sharon Strassfeld, along with several essays in the field. She is married to Hebrew College Rabbinical School Rector Arthur Green. They, their daughter Hannah, and their grandchildren all live in the Boston area.

Contact info: info@sailinginkansas.com

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