Helen Epstein is the author, co-author or translator of ten books of literary non-fiction. They include the ground-breaking Children of the Holocaust, one of the first books to examine the inter-generational transmission of trauma; the biography Joe Papp: An American Life; and the memoir Where She Came From: A Daughter's Search for Her Mother's History. All were named New York Times Notable Books of the Year.
Her books are rigorously documented but in their blend of biography, autobiography and history, the private domain and the public record, they read like novels.
As an editor, Helen published Archivist on a Bicycle, a collection of essays in honor of the late Jiří Fiedler, a Czech Protestant, who for decades under a repressive Communist regime documented Jewish life in the Czech lands. She also edited and co-wrote Looking Back: Memoir of a Psychoanalyst by Paul Ornstein, the internationally renowned psychoanalyst and self-psychologist.
As a translator from the Czech, Helen's work includes Heda Margolius Kovály's Under A Cruel Star: A Life in Prague 1941-1968 and Vlasta Schönová's Acting in Terezín.
For 12 years, she taught journalism at New York University while freelancing. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, New York, The New Yorker, ARTnews and other magazines. She now writes regularly for the New England online magazine The Arts Fuse.
