About the author

At six, I landed the role of Toto in The Wizard of Oz and the acting bug bit.

Seven years later, I played Anne in the Diary of Anne Frank. Preparing for the role consumed me, sparking a lifelong fascination with the Holocaust.

At twenty-two, I did a stint at the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, where I worked for GATT. I was a horribly inept typist in the English typing pool, but it paid for all my travels abroad.

At twenty-four, upon returning home to Africa amid the Rhodesian Bush War, I got serious about my career and was appointed Weekend News Director for Rhodesia Television, a fledgling sanctions-busting studio launched in 1961 with a crew of about twenty employees—the first television studio in Southern Africa, twenty-five years behind its counterpart, America.

I knew almost nothing about news broadcasting, but the studio was in a bind because its director had quit. With a résumé in journalism, performance, and communication, I was a good fit. Being a fast learner, I mastered the unspectacular knack of lacing a projector in under sixty seconds, spliced film, coordinated cameras mounted on wheeled dollies, developed a keen nose for page-one reportage, interviewed newsmakers, brewed gallons of coffee for the crew, and became an intrepid investigative journalist chasing stories with my trusty and mostly inebriated cameraman. Those were the days flying by the seat of our pants!

My marriage to the son of a Holocaust survivor led back to that old obsession. After a fifty-year veil of silence, my mother-in-law, Rifka, survivor of a salt mine and five labor camps, consented to be interviewed. I leaped at the chance to record her story as she spilled the harrowing details that are part of the warp and weft of the book.

Getting her to break her silence is one of the hardest things I've ever had to do. It was a slow, brutal unraveling.

The grand irony was that Rifka and I were estranged for several years. She fiercely opposed my marriage to her son and boycotted the wedding. The book describes the slow flowering of our relationship over three decades.

Vivien lives in Central Florida with her husband, Zak, a gastroenterologist. They have three children and six grandchildren scattered across the United States. When they aren't visiting them, Vivien builds and remodels houses, writes, plays mahjong, and cooks. “While I’m no foodie, I know my way around a kitchen and enjoy watching the Food Network. Street Food is my current favorite.”

In the wake of October 7th, we have learned that anti-Semitism sleeps lightly. Today, we stand on the precipice of a resurgence on a scale not seen since WW2. Wide-ranging and meticulously researched, My Name Is Not Rifka couldn't be more timely. The parallels are horrifyingly prescient.