Songs My Mother Taught Me follows the narrator, confronted with the imminent death of her mother, on a voyage to share the final leg of their lifelong journey together. With candor and lucidity, she retraces the passage from childhood to womanhood under the powerful influence of a loving but suffocating mother. Told by a daughter who has carried all her life the epigenetic endowment inherited from her parents’ experiences during the Holocaust, this raw and painfully honest story digs into the complexities and subtleties of love. Having spent most of her life traveling the globe in an attempt to escape this legacy, the narrator finds herself back in the house she grew up in, where she tries to finally piece together, and find peace with, the looming shadows of her family’s past.

This epic and lyrical tale spans from Transylvania in the 1930s to modernday Tel Aviv, Tokyo, New York, and Paris—giving a literary voice to those affected by PTSD transmitted down the generations.

Trying to escape her heritage, making Tokyo, New York and Paris her home and becoming "a citizen of the world", the formerly successful corporate lawyer ends up in a poor suburb of Tel Aviv, in the house she grew up in, nursing her dying mother. She is forced to revert to Hungary of the beginning of the 20th century, face the ghosts of the past and belatedly cut the umbilical cord that has had an all-consuming grip on her for more than five decades.