Writing My Mother-In-Law’s Memoir Created a Path Towards Forgiveness  

I did not set out to write My Name Is Not Rifka as a path toward forgiveness. I began with a need to document my mother-in-law’s life, a Holocaust survivor whose refusal to talk about her wartime experience frustrated and bewildered me.

During the early years of my marriage to her son, our relationship was fraught. Her trauma lived beneath the surface of everything: in the sharpness of her tone, the unpredictability of her moods, the walls of suspicion she built between herself and the world, including me.

What I couldn’t see then—but came to understand only through writing—was that her suffering had not ended with liberation. It had been absorbed into her body, her voice, her parenting, and by extension, into the family I married into. Writing her story became my way of asking, not just “what happened to her?” but “what happened to us?”

In writing the book, I had to confront my own resentment—at Rifka’s refusal to attend our wedding, her criticisms, her angry outbursts.

Writing a memoir in the aftermath of war is not nostalgia; it’s an act of excavation. It means confronting not just what happened but what we’ve inherited from what happened. In writing the book, I had to confront my own resentment—at Rifka’s refusal to attend our wedding, her criticisms, her angry outbursts. These were not footnotes. They were part of the legacy of war. They were part of the story.

Memoir allowed me to ask the questions I couldn’t ask her—at least, not directly. Why did she push me away? Why was her love so conditional?

Once I began writing her biography, something shifted. The more I pieced together her journey—her childhood in Poland, her escape, hiding in a forest, the people she lost, the unimaginable choices she had to make—the more I saw her not as a mother-in-law, but as a girl running for her life. That shift erased the personal hurt and made space for understanding, which eventually led to the extraordinary flowering of our relationship.

Understanding, I’ve come to believe, is where forgiveness lives.

Trauma doesn't die with the generation that endured it. It nests itself inside families, showing up in overprotection, in silence, in shame, in emotional distance.

One of the most painful realizations that emerged during the writing process was that trauma doesn't die with the generation that endured it. It nests itself inside families. It shows up in overprotection, in silence, in shame, in emotional distance, in unspoken expectations. Rifka’s son, my husband, made life choices shaped by obligations he never fully articulated. He turned down opportunities. He absorbed worry. He carried a weight that wasn’t his to carry.

Memoir offered a language for what had long gone unnamed. It allowed me to map the emotional genealogy of Rifka’s family. And with that map came grief—not just for what Rifka lost, but for the ripple effect of her unspoken suffering.

In one chapter, I describe how Rifka once told her story in fragments, eyes downcast, as if saying the words might break her. And in that moment, I saw her—not as the woman who had once tried to sabotage my marriage, but as someone still trying to survive. That recognition did not absolve every wound, but it allowed me to stop mistaking her pain for rejection.

Writing someone else’s story—especially one marked by trauma—is a moral act. It demands care, humility, and restraint. I struggled with what to include, what to leave out. I feared exposing too much. I feared betraying her memory. But I also feared the consequences of silence. For too long, families like ours have suffered in quiet. Memoir breaks that silence—not to sensationalize, but to understand.

Forgiveness does not mean forgetting. It means remembering with compassion.

In telling Rifka’s story, I was preserving her legacy while examining mine. I was trying to trace how war shaped the choices, temperaments, and relational patterns passed down to my generation. And in doing so, I hoped to disrupt the cycle—not with judgment, but with truth.

Forgiveness does not mean forgetting. It means remembering with compassion. It means seeing complexity where once there was only blame. It means honoring the full humanity of those who hurt us, without excusing the harm.

Memoir is uniquely suited to this task. It allows for contradictions, holding space for both pain and tenderness. It does not demand tidy conclusions. Through the writing of the book, I stopped needing her to be someone else. I began to see the strength it took for her just to go on. And in the space that opened up, forgiveness took root.