Writing Your Story

—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.