For Immediate Release:
Open Road Integrated Media has just released Rochelle Wisoff-Fields’
Havah’s Journey trilogy— Please Say Kaddish For Me, From Silt and Ashes, and As One Must, One Can and coffee table companion book A Stone for the Journey.
Rochelle Wisoff-Fields’s Havah’s Journey trilogy of life before, during, and after the Jewish pogroms in Russia circa 1890 + is a distinct portrait of what families endured.
The first in the series, Please Say Kaddish For Me, introduces us to a young Havah whose family was brutally murdered, their home burned around them. Fleeing only in her shift, in feet of snow and ice, she escapes to a nearby village, to a synagogue for refuge. This begins a new chapter of the rest of her life. The characters become real to the reader; you make them your friends, your family.
In From Silt and Ashes, leaving loved ones and friends behind, Havah and a few relatives and friends escape the marauding horde in Russia, seeking safety in the United States of America. But even in America, the land of the free, there is bias, discrimination, hatred, and mayhem.
As One Must, One Can sees Havah Gitterman, her husband Arel, their children, and surviving family and friends settled into their lives in America, with the turmoil and persecution of Eastern Europe behind them. Or is it? Although physically safe in their adopted country, the ghosts of the dead and the horrors of the past still haunt them.
While everything is up to date in 1908 Kansas City, bigotry and religious discrimination abound. Havah faces each challenge, emotional or physical, with courage, determination, and her father’s voice ever reminding her, “As one must, one can.”
A Stone for the Journey is a walk-through of characters, from each book, from each heart-wrenching story. A picture is truly worth a thousand + words. Twinkling eyes, crinkled creases, and depictions of expression show you who they were.
“Startlingly new! Wonderfully different!” boasted the advertisements for the 1953 Chevrolet sedan. Much to the chagrin of her brother Jeff, Rochelle made her entrance into the world the same year her parents purchased their first car. Growing up in Kansas City, she doesn’t remember wanting to be anything other than an artist. Her mother would bemoan the fact with, “Thanks to Rochelle, I can’t find a clean sheet of paper in this house.”
Early on, Rochelle’s love of the arts extended to writing. At age nine she had a poem entitled “The Girl with the Dolls” printed in a magazine. While excited to see her name in black and white, she wasn’t thrilled with the way her grandmother, a widely published poet in New York, saw fit to edit it.
Kansas City native Rochelle Wisoff-Fields is a woman of Jewish descent — the granddaughter of Eastern European immigrants — whose close personal connection to Jewish history is a recurring theme throughout much of her writing. Growing up, she was heavily influenced by the Sholom Aleichem stories as well as Fiddler on the Roof. Her novels were born of her desire to share the darker side of these beloved tales, and the history that can be difficult to view, much less embrace.
Before becoming an author, Rochelle attended the Kansas City Art Institute, where she studied painting and lithography. Her preferred media are pen and ink, pencil, and watercolor, which she uses in her book covers, character studies, and in her companion coffee table book, A Stone for the Journey.
Rochelle’s short story “Savant” was published in Voices, Vol. III; “The Swimming Lesson,” in Echoes of the Ozarks, Vol. VI; and “Reap the Whirlwind” in Voices, Volume IV. Two of these are included in her own short story collection, with original artwork, This, That and Sometimes the Other (High Hill Press).
Rochelle Wisoff-Fields also does Portraits by Commission. Send her photos and commission her to do paintings for you. Rochelle’s Art Rochelle Wisoff-Fields – Addicted to Purple Rochelle Wisoff-Fields Books Rochelle’s Art Rochelle Wisoff-Fields Art and Blogs Wisoff-Fields Events Wisoff-Fields Media Facebook Author Page Return Again 1930
Represented by Loiacono Literary Agency