I currently have two works in progress.

The first, Footprints Through Time: A White Mother’s Search for Common Roots With Her Black Daughter, is an attempt to connect the dots through time between myself and my daughter, adopted in Mali, in hopes of converging on our most recent common mother, a woman who lived somewhere in Africa more than 100,000 years ago. This manuscript is the fruit of several years of study of evolutionary genetics. Research is proceeding rapidly in the field, and I thus need to update regularly. This may take time.

The second work in progress, What French Jews Don’t Talk About When They Talk About the War, is a discussion among seven French Jews born in the immediate aftermath of WWII about how their parents fled for their lives during the Nazi occupation of France and managed to survive. This lengthy initial discussion — which took place over dinner on one of the magical midsummer nights we have here in Paris, where the light lingers nearly till midnight — is followed by new encounters in which the participants explore how this traumatic family history impacted their lives and why French Jews in general are often still reluctant, 80 years after the end of World War II, to open up about that painful chapter.