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"My mother's grandmother jumped from a window in Vienna at the end of the 19th century. My mother's mother repeatedly threatened to commit suicide in Prague. My mother locked herself in the bathroom in New York, saying she had had enough, that she could not go on."

Epstein's mother, Frances, never did take her own life, but her sudden death at age 69 from a brain aneurysm in 1989 was the impetus for Epstein's unrelenting search to find out what was behind the turbulent, often tragic lives of three generations of Jewish Czech women in her family.

She calls the new memoir her most personal and significant work to date.

"It's the best thing I've ever written," Epstein said in a phone interview last month from her Massachusetts home. "I loved every part of doing it: the research, the writing and giving readings."

Epstein, who is best-known for her book, "Children of the Holocaust: Conversations with Sons and Daughters of Survivors.," recently read excerpts from her new book at a San Francisco appearance sponsored by the Holocaust Center of Northern California.

The book meticulously reconstructs the remnants of three women's lives that Epstein was determined to make whole. At the same time, Epstein makes sense of the historical and social context for Jews in Central Europe from 1848 to 1948.

"I wanted to write a normalized history that began before the Holocaust, incorporated the Holocaust and came out the other side," Epstein said. "I didn't want the women to look like saints or martyrs, just like an ordinary family."

Her grandmother, Pepi, was a high-fashion dressmaker in Prague. Her mother followed in Pepi's footsteps.

Epstein, on the other hand, can't sew.

"I probably could mend something, but that's about it," she said. "I'm not into clothes or fashion at all. I guess it's a reaction to growing up with my mother working at home…I would come home from school and some half-dressed customer would be standing in front of the mirrors in our living room with my mother pinning a sleeve."

What the native New Yorker can do is write.

Epstein, a journalist for three decades whose credits include cover stories for the New York Times Magazine and New York magazine, is also an affiliate of Harvard University's Center for European Studies, and a wife and mother of two.

After her mother, a Holocaust survivor, had died, Epstein wasn't simply inclined to write the memoir. She was compelled, as if moving on with her life depended on it.

Reflecting on all the time she spent in her mother's workroom, she writes, "I fell in love with the dead women in my mother's family. At the end of the day, when the `girls' swept up and threw out threads and scraps of cloth, I collected threads and scraps of stories."

In writing the book, Epstein was able to see her mother's craft in a new light, as well as the value of her own ability to find the seams of a story.

"I began to sense that making and repairing clothes was a form of narrative," she wrote. "I sensed that for me, for my mother, and maybe for those other women in my family that I knew so little about, it had to do with warding off suicide."

Epstein started her quest with a couple of dozen photographs and 12-page family history her mother had drafted several years earlier.

Initially, she "hung out" at the Harvard library for a couple of years, "reading what interested me: Czech women, popular culture in the 19th century, and the degree of Jewish observance in 19th century Bohemia. I began to get a real sense of the history of the region and the roles the Jews played."

While she knew her great-grandmother Therese was an innkeeper's daughter ("She basically poured beer," said Epstein), she discovered that many Jews worked in taverns.

"There were very few choices professionally in Central Europe. Until 1848, Jews lived in the ghetto. For working-class women, there were even fewer options," she said.

Therese fell in love with a customer, a Czech Christian. But she was married off to a Jewish peddler anyway. Her suicide at 44 was prompted by the death of her eldest son.

A crucial phase in Epstein's research was traveling to Czechoslovakia, Austria and Israel.

"Once communism fell in Czechoslovakia, it became possible to do the research," she said. "I had no idea what I was going to find but I followed my instincts."

Because Czech was the language Epstein spoke at home while growing up, she felt a strong sense of belonging during her trip to Central Europe.

"It was a deeply emotional experience," she said. "I felt like I was on intimate terms with everybody in Czechoslovakia. It's like going to Israel and everybody is Jewish. It's a good but very weird feeling realizing you belong to a whole other group of people."

On an emotional front, her journey was even more daunting. "I was trying to understand three generations of women in my family, two of whom I didn't know and one I didn't even have a picture of.

"But I feel much more grounded as a result of writing the book. I've created a grandmother [killed during the Holocaust] for myself and I have a sense of what kind of family I come from."