Imagine having a written record of your life-your thoughts, feelings, lessons learned, conversations, encounters, memories, dreams, travel adventures, and more. In Living and Leaving My Legacy, Merle R. Saferstein shares carefully curated excerpts from her journals. Each is a sampling of her life: the good and bad, the easy and difficult, the ups and downs. At the end of each chapter, she includes journal prompts that can inspire readers and deepen their life journey.
Merle is a story gatherer, a midwife of secrets and stories untold, a skilled observer of life and its mysteries, and a passionate journal writer. She has chronicled with meticulous steadfastness her own life trajectory across over 40 years and 359 volumes, which she has catalogued and curated into 22 interweaving thematic timelines, half of which are presented in this first of two volumes.
As the director of educational outreach at the Holocaust Documentation and Education Center, Merle helped the Holocaust survivors, whom she worked with, share their stories with students. They knew the Holocaust only as vague history until they participated in Merle-organized student symposia.
But her work as storyteller is only part of this legacy journal. Merle also offers unblinking, decades- spanning views of marriage, parenting, her spiritual quest, journaling, her early career, and her exploration of being a woman. The courage to unabashedly reveal roller-coaster highs and lows is outstanding modeling.
The timelines vary according to chapter-the marriage chapter starts in early 1975 and ends in mid- 2017, while the Anne Frank chapter spans nine months in 1985-86. It is thus possible, if one is so inclined, to track parallel paths in Merle's life-what was happening with her and husband Daryl on the marital scene? How might that have been influenced by the feminism track? In the two-year interim period between career fields? On the parenting front? In this way, we get what is perhaps an entirely new form: A memoir that echoes Anais Nin's observation that "as always, my life continues as a musical score, on many lines at once."
