SURVIVING A TURBULENT ERA: THE GRIPPING SAGA OF ONE WOMAN'S RESOLVE TO LIVE, LOVE AND REBUILD

Helaine Helmreich's The Chimney Tree to be released on October 29, 2003

"…inspiring in its portrait of an indomitable human impulse to live, to love, and to rebuild when it seems almost everything has been destroyed." - Lilith

"An inspiring and captivating work-great reading-a romance adventure saga that you will be unable to put down or forget." - Book News

Deep in a Polish forest stands a chimney tree, its trunk hollowed out by lightning. It is 1935, and the tree is a cherished meeting place for Miriam, the beautiful daughter of the Rabbi of Dubnitz, and her Christian love Tadeusz. Miriam's life is devastated when her forbidden liaison is discovered; she is quickly married to a man from another town and sent away. His cruelty and madness send her fleeing to Warsaw, where she finally finds the happiness she has been searching for. Blessed with an idyllic life with a new, loving husband, a flourishing business, and a beloved child, Miriam makes peace with her parents and begins life anew, but when the distant rumbles of Nazism become the roaring maelstrom of World War II and the Holocaust, she is faced with the loss of everything she holds dear. Separated from her husband and son, can she possibly survive a world gone mad to find them again?

From the shtetls of Poland to the bustle of big city Warsaw, the horrors of the Holocaust to Soviet Russia, the tenements of New York to the cobble-stoned streets of Jerusalem, THE CHIMNEY TREE (Toby Press, October 29, 2003, $19.95) is an epic tale that conveys one woman's determination to survive and rebuild her life, and epitomizes the strength and primacy of family and love.

The first part of The Chimney Tree was published in 2000. Substantially revised by the author, it is now published in the full version as envisioned by her.

Helaine Helmreich was born in postwar Brooklyn, New York. She attended Brooklyn College and CUNY Graduate Center, where she earned a Master's degree in speech therapy. Inspired by the many stories she heard growing up in a neighborhood of Holocaust survivors and their children, she began writing The Chimney Tree while spending a Sabbatical year in Jerusalem.