Welcome to More Luck than Brains!

“More Luck than Brains” was my mother’s favorite catch phrase.  She said it when she ran into an old friend at the store.  She said it when she found a place to park on a busy commercial street.  And she said it whenever I, or anyone else, asked her how she escaped Nazi Germany.  

After visiting her birth town of Coburg, Germany, with her in 2008, I decided to write this collection of stories about her family and their escape from the Nazis.  Interspersed with the stories are bits of memoir of that trip.  It was shortly after my mother’s death in 2009 that the phrase “More Luck than Brains” popped into my mind as the title for this collection.  That phrase represents so much about her, her optimism, her joy and humor, and her belief that luck, or lack of it, is random and not something a person earns or deserves.  So this website, and the book it will eventually showcase, had to be called “More Luck than Brains”.  It’s a title she would have liked.