Curse of the Blumenthals

“A tragic car accident, a mistress’s murder and a long reckoning with intergenerational trauma—these are the sorts of crises Tolstoy must have meant when he wrote ‘each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’ And yet, through compassionately dogged reporting, Phyllis Karas, a Blumenthal cousin herself shows how with love, patience and time, family curses can be, if not broken, at least absorbed.” – Michael Kimmel, author of Playmakers: The Jewish Entrepreneurs Who Created the Toy Industry in America
“In fiction, curses are supernatural punishment from a sorcerer. In real life, curses are more akin to serious bad luck, the kind of misfortune that, when familial, can tear a clan apart. Phyllis Karas’s Curse of the Blumenthals is the uplifting story of a family that might’ve splintered but persevered due to the cohesiveness of faith and love. Part genealogy, part family scrapbook, part true-crime reporting, this fascinating memoir is a near-obsessive examination of just how meticulous the agonies of chaos must become before one suspects the cards of fate are stacked.” – Michael Benson, author of Gangsters vs. Nazis
“Whether we like it or not, family forms the fabric of every human being. In Curse of the Blumenthals, an honest and meticulously researched account of the author’s family, Phyllis Karas reveals how two tragedies, nineteen years apart, can have reverberations decades later. This is a story of how an American family can carry sorrow, resilience, and ultimately triumph in the face of tragedy.” – Shirley Russak Wachtel, author of The Baker of Lost Memories and A Castle in Brooklyn

Phyllis Karas, the author of a dozen books, taught journalism at Boston University and was a stringer for People magazine. She is the co-author, alongside Kevin Weeks, of the New York Times bestseller Brutal: The Untold Story of My Life Inside Whitey Bulger’s Irish Mob. She co-authored, with Kiki Feroudi Moutsatsos, The Onassis Women: An Eyewitness Account, the subject of a Dateline NBC special. An award-winning journalist, her work has appeared in Vogue, the Miami Herald, the Boston Globe, and Boston Magazine among others, and she wrote a popular column, “Wit, Wisdom and Woe,” for the Boston Herald.

An alumna of Boston University and George Washington University, Karas and her husband, Jack, a retired physician, are longtime residents of Marblehead, Massachusetts. She has two sons and three grandchildren.

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