Back between the two world wars was a great time to be a Czechoslovakian citizen. The republic had been born in 1918, headed by president Tomas Masaryk, who was not only a democrat but a feminist. Czech had become the national language, blossoming after its second-class status to German under the Austro-Hungarian empire. The new country had both industry and agriculture, and its citizens jubilantly renamed streets and monuments and revised school curricula.
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Much of Czech Jewry was secular in the 1930s, says Helen Epstein, Franzi’s daughter. Epstein has recorded the lives of her forebears in Where She Came From: A Daughter’s Search for Her Mother’s History, a multigenerational memoir of the women of her family published last year. “We think back through our mothers if we are women,” Virginia Woolf wrote, and Epstein agrees; she uses the quote as an epigraph. She began to research her family history in 1989, soon after her mother died at age 69 in New York City. Epstein’s father had died 15 years earlier, and with Franzi’s death she felt alone in the world, even though she had a family of her own and two brothers. Epstein had the stories she’d been told and her mother’s writings–a short family history and a memoir of the Holocaust years–but little of a “tangible past.” There were only a few dozen photos and three porcelain figurines that friends had saved when the Rabineks were taken to a concentration camp.
Epstein, a cultural journalist, had written about the war in her first book, Children of the Holocaust: Conversations With Sons and Daughters of Survivors, which grew out of a 1977 New York Times Magazine cover story and is still in print. As a child of survivors, Epstein wrote, she felt like she carried an iron box inside her containing all the frightening family history and its accompanying emotions. From interviewing other survivors’ children, she says, she found her first real sense of community as an adult.
Upon returning to Prague, Franzi learned that her parents and husband had been killed. She married former Olympic water-polo player Kurt Epstein in 1946, gave birth to Helen a year later, and left with the family for the U.S. in 1948 after the communist coup.
