DALLAS — Karen Baum Gordon knows how to tell a story, and most of all, how to begin one. From the moment you open her memoir, "The Last Letter," you’re hooked.
“My father tried to kill himself when he was 86 years old” are the words that launch this remarkable journey, which is best summed up in the subtitle:
"A Father’s Struggle, a Daughter’s Quest, and the Long Shadow of the Holocaust."
Now 66, Gordon grew up in Dallas and graduated from Hillcrest High School before ascending to Harvard.
Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, our 21st-century world has been pondering the same question that has haunted her family:
“What are the enduring legacies of war?”
For her, it begins with her father, “a traveling shoe salesman” whom she describes as an extrovert and a passionate fan of the Cowboys and Mavericks during his days in Dallas.
The “about the book” section of Gordon’s website peels back the layers, however, to uncover a darker narrative:
“Born a German Jew in 1915, Rudy Baum was 86 years old when he sealed the garage door of his Dallas home, turned on the car ignition, and tried to end his life. After confronting her father’s attempted suicide, Karen Baum Gordon, Rudy’s daughter, began a sincere effort to understand the sequence of events that led her father to that dreadful day in 2002. What she found were hidden scars of generational struggles reaching back to the camps and ghettos of the Third Reich.”
World history left its mark on her childhood, too. She was a second-grader at Preston Hollow Elementary School when President John F. Kennedy came to town in 1963. Because she grew up here, returning is always memorable, most of all for the homecoming it represents. Her older siblings, Richard and Diane, also grew up in Dallas.
During her days at Hillcrest, Gordon worked as a waitress at The Grape, stoking her desire to become a chef. She later switched gears, becoming part of the global management consulting firm, McKinsey & Company.
She now makes her home in Brooklyn, New York, where she and her family were living when the 9/11 terrorist attack toppled the Twin Towers. On that day, her grown children were the same age she was when Kennedy came to Dallas.
"The Last Letter" is a study of the lasting effects of such events.
Gordon’s book offers a deep dive into the lives of two of its victims — her grandparents, Julie and Norbert Baum — whom their son tried in vain to save from the madness that would later engulf them.
Rudy hailed from Frankfurt, Germany, from which his parents were deported in 1941. Both parents died in 1942 in the Łódź Ghetto in Poland.
Rudy came to the U.S. in 1936 and joined the U.S. Army in 1941 before becoming a citizen in 1942. He served in the unit commanded by Gen. George S. Patton that liberated Buchenwald — on his 30th birthday, April 11, 1945.
Before then, however, much had gone wrong.
From 1936 to 1941, his mother wrote him 88 letters that form the basis of Gordon’s memoir. Rudy later found out his mother killed herself at Łódź, but why would he eventually attempt the same? Why would he, as his daughter says, seek to create “his own private gas chamber”?
“I felt compelled to understand why,” she says. “Having the letters translated really started to give me insight into more about my father that I never knew — and what he carried with him.”
Gordon’s mother, Hanne Baum, returned home one day, barely in time to rescue her dying husband, who lived until 2009, seven years after his suicide attempt. Only then did Gordon begin her journey of understanding. Her mother died in 2007.
Her parents were members of Temple Emanu-El, where, in a recent interview with the Texas Jewish Post, Rabbi David Stern spoke of the feeling that shadowed Rudy Baum and millions of others.
“We sometimes think survivors have just ‘survived’ by emerging from the Shoah, but for some that means surviving from being a survivor,” Stern said. “This is a reminder that the finish line wasn’t just making it out, but it is making it through every day since.”
