By the Grace of God

A True Story of Love, Family, War and Survival from the Congo

by Suruba Ibumando Georgette Wechsler
with Howell Wechsler

This searing drama of a family's and a nation's fate is set in the turbulent atmospheres of the Congo and America. It tells the remarkable, forty-year saga of a courageous family's miraculous survival during two devastating civil wars, the brutal rise and fall of the tyrant Mobutu and a desperate trek to safety.

Georgette, who tells the story, is a free-spirited tomboy with an inquisitive mind who makes her way to a new life in America. Josée, her responsible older sister, stays in the Congo and faces the latest oppressor, AIDS. Their father, Benoit, son of the village chief, raises his daughters to believe in equality and to cherish education and freedom in a country wracked by intolerance, corruption and the oppression of women. This moving true account tells their story.

"These are stories no outsider could tell. Because she has been a witness to a promise of freedom and social change that turned into the rot of tyranny, Wechsler's experiences are worth pondering. Here too are small delights of language and culture. Most poignant is the portrait of her father...refreshing in the era of the dysfunctional-family memoir."
— Washington Post

"A riveting memoir."
— Jewish Times

*Featured in the Washington Post, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and the Jewish Times

A New Horizon Press Release
Biography/African-American Literature
6 x 9, 348 pages
LC# 98-66170, world rights
ISBN: 0-88282-165-2 (hc), $24.95