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Johanna Reiss, author of the powerful new book, A Hidden Life, a Memoir of August 1969 (Melville House Publishing). will be reading at Barnes and Noble in Park Slope on May 5th at 7:30 p.m. 

Johanna Reiss writes:

I seem to deal with
grief by writing about it. I did it with The Upstairs Room, the story
of my time in hiding as a Jewish child living in Holland during the
Holocaust.

And now there is my new memoir in which I "look" at
what happened on August 24, 1969, the date and the year my husband
killed himself here, in New York, while I was in Holland to talk to the
family who  had sheltered me during WWII.

Excerpt: 
How do you tell children that life is one continuous goodbye, that with
each day the end comes a little nearer, each step, each touch, each
sound, whether you're around to hear it or not, cars tooting, trains
whistling, boats hooting; how do you explain that people you're close to, or thought you were, can just vanish?