Shifting Borders, Changing Cultures, World War I:

Local Author Lori Wolf-Heffner Releases Creative Non-Fiction Memoir

Cover of Postcards in a Closet, by Lori Wolf-Heffner

Local Author Lori Wolf-Heffner Releases Creative Non-Fiction Memoir

December 8, 2016, Waterloo - Lori Wolf-Heffner, a local freelance writer and translator, has released her first book, Postcards in a Closet, a light, heartfelt story about an unmarried, pregnant woman in 1919 Romania. The book is based on the life of Katharina Wolf, a woman from a farming family who lived from 1901 until some time in the 1960s and wrote postcards to her young granddaughter in Canada.


Using these postcards, additional research, and her own experiences as a mother, Straus imagined what the months leading up to Katharina’s due date might have meant to her.

Katharina struggles with understanding what it means to live in Romania now, though she never moved: after WWI ended, her town and many other chunks of Hungary were annexed to this “foreign" country. Her father also left twice for America to earn money, and out of seven children, five survived at a time when many children still died in childhood.


The book was a venture into Straus’s own heritage, typically called German but more specifically described as Danube Swabian. These people were ethnic Germans living in parts of Eastern Europe from the 18thcentury until World War II, when many were either shipped off to Russian work camps or relocated back to Germany and Austria.


Wolf-Heffner has her Hons. BA and MA in German. Her MA thesis (published under Lori Heffner) investigated how local German families from the Danube Swabian and Transylvanian Saxon cultures passed on German to their descendants. She works at the Waterloo Centre for German Studies, is the administrative coordinator for the Centre’s oral history project, and is a chapter co-author of the Centre’s work-in-progress, a book based on the collected interviews from the project. She lives in Waterloo with her husband and two sons. The ebook is available at Amazon and Kobo, and the physical book from Amazon and directly from Straus. Inquiries can be sent to loristraus@loristraus.com.

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© Lori Wolf-Heffner 2024. All rights reserved.