Join Kathleen A. Balgley in a discussion of just released Letters to My Father: Excavating a Jewish Identity in Poland and Belarus. Kathleen Balgley’s memoir begins with her childhood discovery of her father’s hidden Jewish identity. Seeking to learn more about her own suppressed Jewishness, she immerses herself in the historically terrorized heart of wartime Europe and the epicenter of Jewish suffering by accepting a Fulbright to communist Poland just before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Balgley visits the archives of her father’s birthplace formerly in Poland (Brzesc), now Brest, Belarus and discovers the lives (and deaths) of her relatives. Throughout the journey, bashert (the Yiddish term for “destiny”) uncannily guides her to uncover deeply hidden stories. Her father, who had said he would not travel to Poland to visit, changes his mind after reading letters from his daughter. Touring the country together, father and daughter heal the rift between them.