Open Road Integrated Media’s Mara Anastas takes on Rochelle Wisoff-Fields’s series!

Rochelle Wisoff-Fields self-portrait, Mara Anastas

Rochelle Wisoff-Fields’s Havah Gitterman series 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 have settled into their lives in America, 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 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.

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 Please Say Kaddish for Me, From Silt and Ashes, As One Must, One Can and A Stone for the Journey were born of her desire to share the darker side of these beloved tales; the history of which can be difficult to view, much less embrace.

Before becoming an author, Fields 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 companion coffee table book for the series, A Stone for the Journey.

Fields’s other published works include: short story “Savant,” in Voices, Vol. III; “Reap the Whirlwind” in Voices, Volume IV, and “The Swimming Lesson,” in Echoes of the Ozarks, Vol. VI. These are included in her own short story collection, with original artwork, This, That, and Sometimes the Other (High Hill Press). She is represented by Loiacono Literary Agency.

Rochelle Wisoff-Fields also does portraits. Send her photos and she can do sepia paintings. Rochelle’s Art  Rochelle Wisoff-Fields – Addicted to Purple

Robert and Jeanie Loiacono’s wedding portrait