In Brief: Thread of Life: My Russian Legacy

By Jennifer Kavanagh. Liberalis Books, 2025. 176 pages. $16.95/paperback; $7.99/eBook.

In Thread of Life, Quaker author Jennifer Kavanagh offers evolving versions of her extended family’s story set against the backdrop of twentieth-century European history. She reflects on the construction of memories, the distinction between memoir and history, and the personal impact of major public events.

Many of Kavanagh’s relatives perished in the Holocaust, and she discusses a shift in her relationship to that devastation. She writes: “The Holocaust threw a dark shadow on our lives. It’s something I’ve avoided all my life—I would never read about it, or see a film that dealt with it—till now. It’s taken me all this time to face what it’s meant in the life of my family.”

During a visit to Jerusalem in 1994, Kavanagh learns about the longtime oppression Palestinians have endured. At the Western (Wailing) Wall, she experiences overwhelming grief for her maternal grandmother, Dora, who was fatally shot by the Nazis after being forced to live in insufferable conditions in the Jewish ghetto in Riga, Latvia.

The author’s mother tried ardently, but in vain, to secure a visa to rescue Dora. Kavanagh’s brother recounts his childhood memory of their mother receiving a letter announcing Dora’s death six years after the fact. Kavanagh’s mother wept and could not be consoled.

Readers will appreciate how the book’s vantage point shifts from the panoramic to the personal as well as the captivating details it presents.

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—Reviewed by Sharlee DiMenichi, staff writer for Friends Journal