by Greta Eichel (Author)
Ellen Eichel committed suicide when she was twenty-nine. Surviving Ellen/Second Edition widens the scope of Greta's search for her daughter and the meaning of Ellen's life and death. We read Ellen's own words in letters to her parents and her brother. We see her through the eyes of an exasperated, frightened, loving family who struggles to understand what more they could have done and when to let go. Greta writes the way she speaks, with an artist's eye for detail. The previously unpublished photographs, some heartbreaking in their eloquence, bring the verbal snapshots into sharper focus. Each picture tells its own story. Together, they present a powerful image of courage and healing which will speak to anyone who has suffered loss.
Author Biography
I was born in Brooklyn in 1937 and lived in New York for the next thirty-two years. I met Stuart Eichelbaum when we were art students at Pratt Institute. Stu was born in Brooklyn, but his family moved to Detroit when he was three. He was twenty-three when I met him. A veteran of the Korean War, he was going to college on the GI Bill. I had graduated from James Madison High that year and was eighteen. We became engaged on our third date and married eight months later. After graduating from Pratt I got my first job right away and two weeks later found out it wasn't nearly as difficult to get pregnant as I had been led to believe. And in 1960 there was no such thing as Day Care, so I did freelance artwork at home for the next thirteen years. Stu, after ten years on Madison Avenue was then commuting for three hours a day from our house in Huntington Station. We decided to get out of New York and moved to Knoxville, TN, after Stu got a great job there. We changed our last name to Eichel, and lived in Tennessee for thirty years before moving to Saratoga Springs, NY.