Penning a memoir allows you to capture stories and memories, and preserve them for those who follow

"I have more freedom when I write fiction, but my memoirs have had a much stronger impact on my readers. Somehow the ‘message,’ even if I am not even aware that there is one, is conveyed better in this form.”

—Isabel Allende

Nechamie Margolis, owner of Writing the Soul, specializes in recording family histories and creating heirloom books. With her vast experience in writing family histories and memoirs, she says that “why” is never really a question.

“I belonged to a personal historian association that included members of many cultures and faiths, and they’d often discuss the reasons we should promote our services as memoirists — the sense of closure it gives people to review their life, the passing on of the legacy of family history, the sense of confidence it gives the younger generation to know where they came from,” she explains.

“But when it came to my clients, these discussions were simply unnecessary. They knew exactly why it was important to save the stories of their parents or their grandparents before it was too late. They knew the older generation was the keeper of the family.”

While Nechamie creates family heirlooms through documenting memories, other writers have written their own memoirs about particular experiences. Risa Rotman, author of Terror and Emunah in Har Nof (ArtScroll / Mesorah 2017), explains that she wrote the memoir for many reasons.

“I felt the message of emunah would be applicable to so many people going through different nisyonos — and I was correct,” she says. “Also, in my eyes, the Har Nof attack was so cataclysmic that I wanted the whole world to remember it. I was worried that if an attack could happen in a shul in Har Nof, it could happen anywhere. I didn’t want Klal Yisrael to become complacent.” Sadly, Risa was correct about that, as well.

Lastly, she says, it was “an act of thanking Klal Yisrael for all the chesed and care I received during that difficult time.”

Bracha Goetz published her own memoir, Searching for G-d in the Garbage, in 2017. It’s the only book that the noted children’s author has written for adults, and she tells me how this came to be.

“When I returned to my parents’ home a few years after I became observant, I discovered my diaries and journals, which had been saved, along with the letters I’d sent my parents from Eretz Yisrael while I was still single and becoming observant,” she says.

“Rereading them as a young mother, I was able to see a thread tying them all together, and I was suddenly able to understand how becoming observant helped me to heal from eating-disordered behavior. I was able to finally fill my hungry soul with the nourishment it was desperately craving.” The goal of her memoir was to share a candid case study based on actual documentation, demonstrating that starving souls need spiritual nourishment to overcome addictions.

“When there’s a message I feel the need to share, I write,” Bracha says simply.

Some memoirs are published as messages for the world at large, others are simply distributed to family. But family memoirs are no less important, and indeed, they often become treasured possessions. I still mourn the loss of a taped interview featuring my grandfather a”h and great-grandmother a”h, as they shared many memories and experiences.