Trudi Alexy

In Search of Forgiveness: the Hard but Healing Journey to Self-acceptance Trudi Alexy

Trudi Alexy was born in Romania to a thoroughly assimilated Jewish family. After fleeing from Prague to Paris in 1938 to escape the Nazis, they hid in Fascist Spain as hastily baptized Catholics before immigrating to America. Although torn by guilt over surviving the Holocaust "by fraud" while living in Barcelona, eleven-year-old Alexy fell under the spell of Catholic rituals and promise of forgiveness. She planned to become a nun but left the church, disillusioned by anti-Semitism and tormented by recurring guilt and suicidal depression. The love of her life, a Greek boy she met as a teenager and hoped to marry, came looking for her after a thirty-year-long separation. His recent death, thirty years after they found each other again, opened the floodgates to her most personal memories, recorded in In Search of Forgiveness. She describes her many travel adventures, her tender affair with an Arab diplomat, her betrayal by an unscrupulous therapist, and her relationships with famous writers/mentors like Henry Miller, Anais Nin and Morris West. In her sixties, she began a search for the heritage she lost as a child, chronicled in two books, the award-winning The Mezuzah In The Madonna's Foot* and its sequel, The Marrano Legacy**.*Simon & Schuster, hard cover, 1993Harper/San Francisco, paperback, 1994**University of New Mexico Press, 2003