Every morning now, for the last several years, I go outside, to my backyard usually but elsewhere in we’re traveling, with my dog Boo and read a poem aloud. First I look at the garden, at how the two citrus…

Every Rassov mission throughout history was immortalized on parchment, complete with brilliantly colored panels of intricate storytelling. The blood-letting in each panel was particularly vibrant,incarnadine, as were the robes of each legendary Rassov commissioned to perform the cleansing. Interestingly, the…

Agatha was plagued by nightmares, haunted by guilt. She was free yet her family was for all intensive purposes, dead, if they were lucky. Like other German Jews in America, she had heard the rumors. Unknown work camps. Train rides,…

The village gates stand open in the damp Iridescence of what will soon be morning dew Silent but for a soughing sound they lean upon their posts Defeated Grey and exhausted as you Know you will never be You will…

I remember laying on the ground of the pews at my aunt’s funeral. I named my stuffed animal after her once she passed away. I still have it. I sat between my grandmother and grandfather, pressed against the wooden pews…

While we ate supper, my boyfriend raged against my job on a cattle ranch (which I was proud to have), saying that I should stay home, cook and clean. I had smeared his face with the mashed potatoes he had…

We live our lives until we no longer can. Until that final goodbye, all the rest of the pauses in the pain were simply poses of escape, moments of respite, vacations of calm. After each one, there was then the…

With November, the weather in Bremerhaven cooled. Snowflakes dotted the cobble stone streets then quickly melted away. In Berlin, the snow remained. Agatha looked out the front windows of Frau Bleich’s home. The vibrant city had turned dark and stormy.…

When my son Max was in nursery school, three years old or so, the teacher pulled me aside to ask me to tell Max not to give away his toys. “What do you mean?” I said “Well,” DiDi said, whenever…

There's a place inside my core that holds the foundation of the idea for a film, the inciting incident, "I want to make a film about this." In all these decades of making films, the memory of that inciting incident…

It took everything to get here. All that fell away: relationships, pride, money, inherited values. What would I have kept from holding on when it turned out love was water? You can’t hold it with fingers clenched in a fist;…

For centuries, throughout their extensive family tree, the notorious Rassov’s trusted only each other. It had to be that way, for the nature of the Family Business demanded care, discretion, and utmost death-defying solidity….a united front, preserved through centuries of…