I began working on my grandmother’s book back in the late 80’s. In 1989 I collected copies of correspondence about her nursery from several Chicago archives. Shortly after getting all of this stuff my neatly structured life crashed, I put the materials away and only returned to it now. I’ve been scanning all of these documents and reading them as I go along. My grandmother certainly generated a lot of controversy. (She did this within the family, also.) Family mythology simplified all of the reasons for the controversy, so it’s interesting to see the point of view of all of the parties involved. Some of the factors: the larger schism between German Jews and Eastern European Jews; misogyny, this was a woman, leading women, raising huge amounts of money for her own cause; competition between groups working for the same causes (orphanages or infant group homes); prevailing scientific opinion that group homes for children were not a good thing. Most of the documents were written by men, powerful men who lined up on both sides of the controversy. The women just continued doing their thing.