A photograph with faint writing on the back. A traveling chess set. A silver pin.

In Daughter of History: Traces of an Immigrant Girlhood, Harvard professor Susan Rubin Suleiman uses such everyday objects and the memories they evoke to tell the story of her early life as a Holocaust refugee, aged five when the Nazis marched into Budapest, and then, after the Communist Party took over Hungary, as an American immigrant, via Austria, France and Haiti. Probing the intergenerational complexities of immigrant families and the inevitability of loss, she shows how historical events shape our private lives.