Merle Saferstein Leaves a Legacy of Journals

In Living and Leaving My Legacy, educator, speaker and author, Merle R. Saferstein, writes a two volume memoir drawn from her vast collection of personal journal writing. The first volume, which was published in June 2022, covers her earlier life and discusses her career, her marriage, and raising children, and the second volume, released in June 2023, focuses on her later life in which she writes about her legacy work, her time educating Holocaust survivors, visiting hospice patients, and her thoughts on death and dying. Regarding her process for creating this memoir, Saferstein said, “…I decided that I was going to go back and embark on this journey, starting with journal one and reading, and what I decided to do was take topics… it took me 14 years to go through… 359 journals, and I ended up taking excerpts from 70 different topics… and then I had to decide which topics I was willing to share and by then I realized I was willing to put these books out into the world and not just for my children and my grandchildren… but for a broader audience because I realized at that point that I did have some things that I felt people could relate to… Then I narrowed it down to 22 topics, at which point when I had the 22 topics, I decided I would do 2 books.”

As far as what to include in her memoir, it took Saferstein some time to decide which pieces from her journals to use. Additionally, she also felt the need to write about her experiences in a way that was more relatable to her readers. “When I first did the marriage chapter, when I went back and read it, it was really lovely and it was a lot of… fluff, and I thought anyone who reads this, who has been married… or any relationship for a long period of time knows that it’s not just all cherries and wonderful… I started pulling some of the real stuff… I realized that people are going to read this book, hopefully they will learn and see the humanness in all of us and be able to relate… if it were all positive, people would not relate the same way because no one’s life is all one way, all good.”

Going forward, what will Saferstein do with all her completed journals? “In my will, it’s that they’re to be destroyed upon my death. No one is to read them and my kids know that and my husband knows that, but I do have a friend who’s an artist and she is really wanting to do some kind of art project with them… I don’t know whether that will happen, but it’s possible… I would like to not destroy them, truthfully, and I’d also like to be able to read them one time without all this craziness… just sit down… Sit down and just read them from cover to cover and just, kind of, re-live my life.”