Workshop
Epistolary Memoirs
Featuring Author, Speaker, Parenting Expert, and Artist, Rachel Biale
1:00pm | Conference Room
Jewish Arts and Bookfest
Sunday, May 4, 2025
at UC Berkeley’s Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life, 2121 Allston Way, Berkeley, CA
This program will feature selected readings from the joint memoir of Rachel and her husband, David z”l, Aerograms Across the Ocean: A Love Story in Letters, based on 258 love letters exchanged in 1970-72, and from her newly published And Now Love Can Begin: My Parents’ Imagined Memoir based on 100 love letters from 1945-46.
This will be followed by discussion and practical tips on how to turn your family’s mementos: letters, writings, photographs, and heirloom objects into an “imagined memoir:” how to capture your parents’/ancestors’ voices, and how to insert your own and create a fictional conversation across time and place.
About Rachel Biale
Rachel Biale grew up on kibbutz Kfar Ruppin in Israel and has worked in the Bay Area Jewish community for over four decades. She currently serves as the Executive Director of New Lehrhaus. She has also had a private practice as a parenting consultant/coach for over 40 years. She earned a BA and MA in Jewish History at UCLA and a Master of Social Work from Yeshiva University.
She is the author of Women and Jewish Law (1984), a memoir, Growing Up Below Sea Level: A Kibbutz Childhood (2018), Lost and Found (2020), a historical novel, a joint memoir with her husband, Aerograms Across the Ocean: A Love Story in Letters 1970-72 (2020) and And Now Love Can Begin: My Parents’ Imagined Memoir 1945-46 (2024), as well as What Now? 2-Minute Tips for Solving Common Parenting Challenges (2020).
Photo credit: Andrew Hasse
About And Now Love Can Begin
An “imagined memoir” the author’s parents might have written (but didn’t – she did) based on 100 love letters exchanged in Palestine, 1945-46.
And Now Love Can Begin: My Parents’ Imagined Memoir: Based on 100 Love Letters; Palestine, September 1945 – July 1946 comprises quotes from the letters exchanged between September 1945 and July 1946 while the author’s mother worked as a nurse in the Afula hospital and her father served in the British Army in Palestine and Alexandria, Egypt. Interspersed with letter sections are their imagined reflections 50 years later as well as some comments by the author – their daughter.
About Aerograms Across the Ocean: A Love Story in Letters
Co-authored with husband, David Biale
In August 1970, a 21-year-old American Jewish student, arrived at Kibbutz Kfar Ruppin in Israel’s Bet She’an Valley as a volunteer. There, he met a kibbutznik, nine days shy of her eighteenth birthday. They began an intense dialogue about how a secular Jew might be Jewish and what the role of Israel and kibbutz ought to be in modern Jewish life.
Aerograms Across the Ocean: A Love Story in Letters opens a window into the lives and thoughts of two passionate young people, trying to find their identities and life trajectories in the tumultuous early 1970s. The jointly-written memoir is a coming-of-age story in Israel after the Six Day War and in America during the Vietnam War. The book chronicles a romance emerging through the 258 letters the authors exchanged, transporting readers back to a different age, half a century ago.