Broken engagement, broken promise, broken elbow, broken heart. When recently widowed Pearl King decides to spend the summer of 2014 with her daughter in Israel, she brings along old German letters for her granddaughter to translate. Following a broken engagement, Ilana Horowitz is eager for the distraction. These letters spark numerous questions and while answering them, Pearl shares stories about her past. Her husband had been a Ritchie Boy, her brother-in-law one of the Kindertransport children, and she’d been an army nurse. Pearl’s visit takes an unexpected turn after the kidnapping and tragic murder of three boys on their way home from yeshiva and the eruption of Operation Protective Edge. Yossi Klein, Ilana’s former fiancé, is injured in a hit-and-run. Pearl’s son, married to a non-Jew, visits after she breaks her elbow. As the Horowitzes and Kleins navigate the war—trying to keep their spirits up, faith intact, and repair what is broken—Pearl’s recollections convey that the past is never truly gone. Instead, with Hashem’s help, our memories shape and build a better, brighter future. Ester Katz Silvers writes: “My life has been full of miracles, beginning with the fact that my father and all of his family escaped from Nazi Germany before the war. That combined with the miracle that my mother, born in a small American town, did not lose her Jewish identity gave me a traditional Jewish upbringing in Wichita, Kansas. Somehow, I didn’t assimilate or intermarry as so many of my contemporaries did. Rather, I moved to Arizona for university, met my future husband, and together we became Torah observant Jews. After twelve years in Phoenix, Arizona, and with five children, we made aliyah and settled in Shiloh, once home to the Mishkan/Tabernacle. We were blessed with another two children, and now all are married with children of their own — all miracles. Every day I’m grateful to the Almighty for the miracle of allowing me to live in Israel for over thirty years.” The Past Is Never Past is the author’s third published book.
