Lisa Gru­en­berg first start­ed writ­ing when her elder­ly father, a Vien­nese Holo­caust sur­vivor, began hav­ing flash­backs and night­mares about the past. She wrote in the voice of her father’s sis­ter, Mia, who dis­ap­peared into Ger­many in 1941 and whose name her father would not say out loud until a year before his death. Her father always spoke about his city in the most joy­ous way. By the time she inquired more deeply, he was unable to reli­ably remem­ber the past. After his death, she trans­lat­ed fam­i­ly let­ters and trav­eled to Vien­na and Ger­many to explore his lost land­scape. She inter­wove her present-day sto­ry with Mia’s and her father’s, link­ing them with pho­tographs, pri­ma­ry-source doc­u­ments, let­ters, her father’s writ­ing, and the joy­ful tales he told her long ago. This is a Holo­caust tale, but it is also very much the mod­ern-day sto­ry of the rela­tion­ship between one daugh­ter and her father, about how trau­ma trav­els down through the gen­er­a­tions, and about how we find mean­ing in our lives.