My Mother Was the Most Beautiful --
A Memoir of Visoka Litovsk My Mother Was The Most Beautiful is a memoir of a young girl, Dorothy Rogin Kraus, and her life until shortly after WWI in the Russian town of Wysokie Litewskie.
Dorothy gives us plentiful and unique details of daily life in her small Jewish town up to and including WWI. What they ate. How a chicken was prepared. The problems of surviving the cold. Variations in Jewish belief and levels of observance. Details of a difficult and surprisingly complex shtetl life. She describes her family.
In 1920, the family finally emigrated to the U.S. to join Dorothy's father, and here the Memoir narrative ends
In America
Information found about Dorothy from other sources indicate that she entered high school in Cleveland, Ohio, shortly after her family arrived in the U.S. It appears that during high school, she made notes about her childhood life. Later, perhaps in 1923, she revisited the notes and produced the manuscript upon which this presentation is based.
As far as can be determined, besides writing My Mother Was The Most Beautiful as a young adult, Dorothy never expressed interest in or commitment to her Eastern European Jewish heritage. According to several people who knew her, she never talked about or demonstrated that heritage.
Editor's Notes: Dorothy describes her hometown as being in Poland, which is culturally correct. But during most of the events she describes, the town was under Russian control, so --technically-- her birthplace was in Russia.