Debbi Perkul

Rae Landy kept a journal while she was in Jerusalem, but due to her fear of being arrested by the Ottoman authorities, she destroyed it right before she left the city. She later wrote that she always regretted this action, and even reflected on several solutions she could have employed to save this important reservoir of information. Because of her actions, the only firsthand accounts we have of Rae's time in Ottoman Jerusalem are preserved in the Hadassah newsletters, which contain excerpts of Rae's and her partner nurse Rose Kaplan's letters they sent to Henrietta Szold. Their original letters were lost or destroyed. 

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To write this book, I relied on these excerpts, found in the Hadassah archives, which provide fascinating details of life in Jerusalem, and which are heavily excerpted in this book. But I also had to find other sources that documented life during 1913-1915 Palestine, the last years of the Ottoman Empire. It was a fascinating journey, where every day new treasures were revealed. I encourage anyone who is interested in historical research to pursue this passion. Archived newspapers that are now digitized were a tremendous source of information. The website forgottenbooks.com gave me access to original writings of that time period, which presented additional invaluable insight into the stories that I found to be just hinted at in published books about this time period.  And digitized archives, such as those of the Library of Congress and the Joint Distribution Committee were fantastic.

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I felt like a detective as I pieced together my great-great-great aunt's story, taking one sentence she wrote and then finding others' documentation to fill in the blanks. My hope is that this book will fill in a large gap of knowledge of this time in history, and of course, to reveal the story of Rae, a brave, strong woman of her time, that until now, history has largely forgotten.