Walking with Ghosts

During a walk to town, Elizabeth Welt Trahan allows the memories of her childhood to surface after more than a half century - first in short, disconnected snippets but then more and more insistently, until she is pulled back into the nightmarish world of Hitler's Vienna where, being Jewish, she barely survived. But this is also the story of the maturing process of a young girl during those shattering times. Despite an aloof and insensitive father, a circle of friends that is continually decimated by deportations, and the abrupt ending of a timid first love relationship, she is able to draw strength from the trivial and small pleasures of daily living.

The Author: Elizabeth Welt Trahan, born in Berlin, Germany, in 1924, lived in Moravská Ostrava, Czechoslovakia, from 1929 to 1939, and in Vienna until her departure for the United States in 1947. With degrees from Sarah Lawrence, Cornell, and Yale, she taught at the universities of Massachusetts and Pittsburgh, the Monterey Institute of International Studies and, until 1993, Amherst College. Her publications include textbooks, translations, studies in German, Russian, and comparative literature, and translation and interpretation methodology. Currently, she is the book review editor of The Independent Scholar. She lives in Amherst, MA.