Program Description
Event Details
Join Susan Weissbach Friedman with moderator Stephanie Newman as they discuss Susan's debut novel, Klara's Truth.
It is May 2014, and Dr. Klara Lieberman—forty-nine, single, professor of archaeology at a small liberal arts college in Maine, a contained person living a contained life—has just received a letter from her estranged mother, Bessie, that will dramatically change her life. Her father—who has been absent from her life for the last forty-three years, and about whom she has long been desperate for information—has been dead for many years, a fact which Bessie clearly knew. But now the Polish government is paying reparations for land it stole from its Jewish citizens during WWII, a group which includes her father, and Bessie wants the money. Klara has little interest in the money but she does want answers about her father. She flies to Warsaw, determined to learn more.
Susan Weissbach Friedman is a psychotherapist with a specialty in women’s issues, family therapy, and trauma-focused therapy. A graduate of Hamilton College, Boston University’s MSW/MPH program, and the Ackerman Institute for Couples and Families, she has also completed EMDR and Somatic Experiencing (SE) training in trauma therapy techniques and has been a practicing clinician for more than 25 years. Originally from Long Island, she now lives in Westchester County, where she enjoys practicing yoga and mindfulness, going for walks in nature, listening to music, and spending time near the ocean. Susan has been married to her husband for thirty years and has two daughters in their twenties. Klara’s Truth is her first novel.
Stephanie Newman, Ph.D, until recently a long-time Edgemont resident, is a psychoanalyst and clinical psychologist in private practice, a nonfiction author, a novelist, and a public speaker. She is the author of Barbarians at the PTA and Madmen on the Couch, co-editor of/contributor to Money Talks, and Adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia University in the clinical psychology Ph.D program.