Karen A. Frenkel

For most of my career I was an award-winning science and technology journalist, author, and documentary producer. I wrote for many kinds of readers: lay, professional, business, kids, and pretty much anyone interested in high-technology and science. In addition to explanatory journalism, I also wrote about the impact of science and technology on culture. I also made two documentaries for public television about the impact of technology on society––one on women and computing, the other about elearning. 

 

During the past decade, I transitioned from reporting to narrative nonfiction. My parents were European Jews and I knew I had a dramatic story to tell about their struggles to outwit Hitler. People sometimes assume that all Holocaust survivors were in concentration camps but that was not so in my mother's case. My father was a refugee, but those who escaped Europe before the Nazi onslaught were often silent in the face of the suffering of their brethren stranded in the Third Reich. My mother survived as slave laborer in Germany posing as a Polish Catholic. I applied my investigative skills to my family history and launched the project described below.

 

The Family Treasures Lost and Found Project: A Documentary and a Memoir
In 2014, I embarked upon a journey of discovery to fill gaps in my parents' World War II stories of survival. My father, a Polish refugee from Lwów, now Lviv, Ukraine, disclosed nothing of his pre-war life. He died at age 57 when I was 15, so I never had the opportunity to talk to him adult-to-adult. My mother survived as a slave laborer in Germany posing as a Catholic Pole. In contrast to my father, she did talk about the war, but spoke selectively to my sisters and me of her travails. I'm very grateful, however, that in 1987 at my urging, she recorded her story for the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University. Her plight as a teenager upon the onset of the war and through Liberation was complicated, so I scoured Poland's online and real archives to clarify and fact-check her tale.

 

All I knew of my enigmatic father's life in Europe was told to me by my mother and his older brother. To discover more about my father's medical school days at the University of Vienna and how he arrived in New York via the Caribbean in 1939, I perused virtual and real archives in Poland, Ukraine, Israel, and the United States. When confronted by language barriers, I hired researchers and genealogists. My father served in the U.S. Army Medical Corp and treated soldiers in Southern England, Normandy, and The Battle of the Bulge. Ultimately, I was able to match the many unlabeled photos of his wartime collection to his unit history, which I found in the National Archives.

 

In 2016, I visited the cities where most of the action took place: Kraków (my mother's birthplace), Vienna, Tarnów (where my maternal grandparents sent my mother in 1941 thinking it would be safer than Lwów where they were hiding on the Aryan side), and Lviv, Ukraine, previously Lwów, Poland (the location of my paternal grandparents' stunning house). I knew not only that my grandfather had buried jewels there but also just were to look. I did not know that the house is now a UNESCO World Heritage site. I also take readers to Havana, Veracruz, and New York City, where a large part of my father's story takes place. 

The resulting memoir, 75-minute documentary, and series of five documentary shorts chronicle my parents' and only grandfather's survival, and the fates of my other grandparents and uncle, and my investigative quest. I detail the lengths to which my father, mother, and paternal grandfather went physically, emotionally, and morally to save themselves, and how far I went to find facts. Director Marcia Rock and Consulting Producer Roger Sherman, both award-winning filmmakers, collaborated with me on the Family Treasures Lost and Found documentaries.

 

I began my painstaking process of discovery with low expectations, and never found the material treasure my grandfather hid, but an adventure unfurled full of unexpected twists and turns. I was astounded by the rich information in 19th and early 20th century documents just waiting to be found. The most surprising reward, however, is a deep sense of connection to my lost relatives, especially my three grandparents and uncle, who until now were strangers I referred to as my mother's father, my mother's mother, and my father's mother., my father's little brother. I discovered another kind of treasure; I learned that it is possible to love people you have never met. 

 

For more information about my memoir, which will be available on Amazon on March 11, please visit Family Treasures Lost and Found Memoir. 

For more information about the Family Treasures documentaries, please visit Family Treasures Lost and Found Documentary and Five-Part Series.

 

Previous Documentaries
I directed, co-wrote, and co-produced net.LEARNING, which covered the pros and cons of teaching and learning online. My first documentary is the award-winning Minerva's Machine: Women and Computing. For more information about these films, please see the Filmmaker page. Minerva's Machine evolved from my November 1990 article on women in computing in Communications of the ACM, the flagship magazine of the Association for Computing Machinger, where I was for many years the features and then senior writer.

Honors and Awards

• Guest Speaker, The New York Academy of Science, "The Human Genome Project and Informatics" (November 1991, CACM).
• Net.LEARNING: 1998 National Education Reporting First Prize, Television Documentary and Feature
• Minerva's Machine: Women and Computing: Best Documentary in a Small Market, 1997 EMMA (Exceptional Merit Media Award) given by the National Womens' Political Caucus and Radcliffe College.
• Best Documentary, Brooklyn Arts Council's 30th Annual International Film and Video Festival.
• Best Television Series, Runner Up, Eleventh Annual Computer Press Award.

Creative Non-Fiction

My short stories have appeared on MrBellersNeighborhood.com, The East Hampton Star, and The Jewish Literary Journal.

 

Freelance Science and Technology Columns and Articles

I began my career covering robotics and computer science and still report on both. What I love about these fields is that they are interdisciplinary. I covered artificial intelligence, interactive multimedia, computer aided design, computer security, computers and medicine, databases and the human genome project, high-definition television, parallel processing, and supercomputers. Most recently, I contributed bi-weekly stories on research reports on security and cyberwarfare to CIOInsight.com. I also covered the Internet of Things (IoT), the Cloud, apps, Big Data, Open Software, project management and anything else of interest to Chief Information Officers. I also covered technology and society, particularly women and STEM, for three decades. 

 

My many articles have appeared in Bloomberg Businessweek (Businessweek.com), Bloomberg.com, CyberTimes, the first site of The New York Times online, Communications of the ACM the magazine of the Association for Computing Machinery and CACM.acm.org, its online version), Discover, Forbes, Essence Magazine, FastCompany.com, Medical World News, Millimeter, Personal Computing, Publish, Science Magazine, Science NOW, Scientific American and ScientificAmerican.com, Technology Review, U.S. News and World Report, VAR Business, and YoungEntrepreneur.com.

 

I continue to bear a fascination for the power of computers and engineering and for computer science innovators.  

  

Previous Books
With Isaac Asimov I co-authored Robots: Machines in Man’s Image (Crown Publishing Group/Harmony Books, 1985), which was translated into Japanese, German, Spanish, and Hungarian. It was selected by the United States Information Agency as one of 1,000 books to represent the diversity of American culture in a traveling book exhibit that toured the Soviet Union in 1987. Beginning at the Moscow Book Fair, the exhibit was called “Many Booked America: the People, Politics, and Government of the United States.”

  

Scripts, Columns, and Earlier Online and Magazine Articles

I've written scripts for "The Loh Down on Science," a radio show hosted by Sandra Tsing Loh for Southern California Public Radio station 89.3 KPCC FM, broadcast out of California Institute of Technology. It was great to participate in injecting a little humor into science.

 

Education
M.S. Science Communication, Journalism Department, School of Communication, Boston University.

B.A. philosophy of science and psychology, Hampshire College.

 

Professional Affiliations

• Past Board Member, Director of Programming, New York Women in Film and Television, Co-Chair, Documentary Subcommittee
• The Authors Guild
• The Silurians Press Club

Adjunct Instructor, New York University

I taught a six-week course online for NYU's School of Continuing and Professional Studies, called "Reporting and Writing in the Digital Era." Students learned how to craft features for the Web, and to embed photo slideshows, video, and audio. I also taught "Interviews and Profiles," a five-week course in a real classroom.