A house fire in 2011. A box sur­vives. Its con­tents became the cat­a­lyst for a quest whose seeds were plant­ed in 1983 – the day Lin­da learned her Catholic father was Jew­ish, and what lit­tle fam­i­ly his­to­ry she knew was a lie.

Search­ing for truth, Lin­da pieced togeth­er the sto­ry of eight gen­er­a­tions of her Jew­ish ances­tors —the Politzer fam­i­ly — their remark­able lives lost to her father’s secrets. Lin­da learned of their resilience in sur­viv­ing reli­gious per­se­cu­tion, wars, epi­demics, and eco­nom­ic upheavals. Their sto­ries became her book, The Politzer Saga.

The Hun­gar­i­an soci­ol­o­gist who helped Lin­da trace her fam­i­ly wrote, ​“I hard­ly know any non-fic­tion sagas to bet­ter exem­pli­fy Hun­gar­i­an Jew­ish fate of the past 300 years …. All that fan­tas­tic tal­ent and readi­ness to act for the birth of mod­ern Hun­gary. All the suf­fer­ing they went through …”

For this rea­son, the Hun­gar­i­an Jew­ish Muse­um and Archives mount­ed a per­ma­nent exhib­it, The Politzer Saga, in the Rum­bach Syn­a­gogue in Budapest based on the sto­ries in the book.