Seeking a Common Thread: A novel based on a True Holocaust Story; Book One of the Trunk Trilogy

Seeking a Common Thread is a coming-of-age novel that takes the reader back and forth in time to Vienna of the 1920s and 1930s, where we meet Lusia Spielvogel, to Connecticut in 1972, where we meet Susan, a fifteen year-old-teenager. All her life, Susan had wondered what was inside the trunk that had always stood in the corner of her family's dining room. Susan's father, Samuel, is secretive and never speaks of the relatives he lost in the Holocaust. There has been a break in the strand of family, and Susan feels no connection to those relatives who were lost. Samuel and his immediate family had lived in Vienna and remained there for a year after the Anschluss. He was able to escape to Ireland through the sponsorship of a Righteous Gentile named Florence Hobson. Samuel's Tante Lusia and Onkel Jakob were not as lucky. They had packed away a trunk filled with their possessions in anticipation of a future life in freedom; a future that was never to be. Once the family opens up the trunk to reveal its contents, Susan tries to get to know the mysterious "woman of the trunk" through her possessions. Susan discovers a halfway completed embroidered tablecloth among the items in the trunk. A project started, never to be completed by its original owner. The narrative of Seeking a Common Thread interweaves Lusia's story with Susan's completion of the unfinished tablecloth and how, through the act of embroidery to complete the project, Susan discovers Tante Lusia's story and and in turn discovers herself and a connection to family. The author's father, Samuel, was an eyewitness to the Anschluss and the rise of the Nazis in Austria. The author's grandfather, David Spielvogel, was an inmate in Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps. The narrative of Seeking a Common thread is based on the objects found inside Lusia's trunk, the author's father's testimony and incorporates letters from his personal collection.