Heidi B. Neumark

Hid­den Inher­i­tance: Fam­ily Secrets, Mem­ory, and Faith by Heidi B. Neu­mark is a non-fiction book in which the author traces her roots. Ms. Neu­mark is a pas­tor in the Bronx and wrote sev­eral books, as well as arti­cles previously.

Hid­den Inher­i­tance: Fam­ily Secrets, Mem­ory, and Faith by Heidi B. Neu­mark serves as a Lutheran pas­tor in The Bronx, while doing a geneal­ogy search she dis­cov­ered that her father was Jew­ish. As Ms. Neu­mark digs through her past, she dis­cov­ered that some of her rel­a­tives got bap­tized to escape the Nazi death machine.

I found the book to be poignant and hon­est. The author reveals that the reli­gion she loves, also sym­bol­izes her family’s loss of another faith. The sto­ry­telling is not in lin­ear fash­ion, which I didn’t mind at all.

I do think Ms. Neu­mark can, should and is qual­i­fied to explore the issues of reli­gion she brought up, but didn’t answer some of them. For exam­ple, she men­tions that she feels part of the Jew­ish com­mu­nity, even as a Lutheran pas­tor, but doesn’t expand on this very inter­est­ing point.

The author also inserts many pas­sages from the Bible, which I thought was over­done and with lit­tle con­text. While she may be famil­iar with the intri­ca­cies of the texts, I could have done with­out them, or with a bit more com­men­tary how the texts relate to her situation.

While the book is mar­keted as “Christian”, I think anyone would enjoy it. It is an well writ­ten, intel­li­gent book with a riv­et­ing story which I’m glad was told.

I received this book for free in exchange of an honest review

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Not to take anything away from the author and her family heritage but I as not enthralled but this book or learning the history of the author's past. This actually saddens me some. The biggest reason I wanted to check this book out is because I have always been fascinated by reading stories of the people who survived one of the worst events in history. Yet, I could not grasp any olive branch of a connection towards the author or her family history.

Maybe this had to do with the fact that the author did no know much about her family and so she talked like she them at a distance. So I felt disconnected. Additionally, it seemed that the author was feeling guilty that she was Lutheran and found many moments to insert passages from the Bible. So after a while, the book came off a little preachy. I got about half way into the book and could not finish the book.… (meer)