Roll Back the World: A Sister’s Memoir

Born during WWII, Deborah Kasdan’s sister Rachel spent a transformative year in Israel-after which she was diagnosed with schizophrenia and sent to the first of many psychiatric hospitals. It was there she languished until a mental health worker gave her a chance at freedom. A searing look at the impact of severe mental illness on a Jewish family in mid-century America, this memoir will resonate with anyone who has struggled to help a loved one in crisis.

Deborah Kasdan lived in the Midwest before moving to the Northeast, where she had a thirty-five-year career writing about business and technology. She has served on the board of directors of an intergenerational housing organization and the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) for Southwest CT. She is a passionate swimmer and yoga practitioner, and a grandmother of four. During the summer she and her husband vacation near the great Nauset Marsh of Cape Cod and live the rest of the year in Norwalk, Connecticut. She is currently working on a novel based on her mother’s stories about growing up in Chicago during the 1930s.