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“Letters to Memory” is a Sansei memoir of family, incarceration and Japanese American history
With the end of the Nisei generation upon us, their children, the Sansei, are sometimes fortunate enough to inherit a record of the life of their parents and grandparents. That is, if the record – photos, letters, artifacts – was ever kept or still exists. Sansei Karen Tei Yamashita is one of the lucky ones, for she inherited a trove.
The Los Angeles-based novelist and playwright pulled her family’s past together in her latest book, Letters to Memory (2017, Coffee House Press). Instead of just chronologically stringing along what she found, however, Yamashita frames the f…
