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The End of Her: Racing Against Alzheimer's to Solve a Murder
Who was behind the brutal murder of my great-grandmother? wondered Wayne Hoffman, a New York City-based journalist and novelist. The crime wasn't just a family legend-it made headlines across Canada in 1913-but her killer had never been found. In The End of Her , Hoffman meticulously researches this century-old tragedy, while facing his mother's decline from Alzheimer's. Weaving back and forth between past and present, Hoffman invokes in dramatic detail the life and death of his immigrant great-grandmother in Winnipeg, and his mother's downward spiral. In the process, he discovers an extended family that has been scattered across thousands of miles for a hundred years. "Journalist Hoffman ( Hard and two other novels) makes his nonfiction debut with a riveting account of his dual efforts to care for his aging mother and crack a century-old unsolved murder...Hoffman makes the details of his dogged research vivid...and his conclusions about the murder are convincing. Meanwhile, he movingly recounts his mother's increasing memory loss and overall decline. This is a unique addition to the cold case subgenre, and a powerful mix of true crime and family memoir." Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"A murder mystery wrapped like a delicious knish around a familial love story. The End of Her is the story of a journalist attempting to solve the long-ago puzzle of who shot his great-grandmother in her bed in small-town Winnipeg in 1913. But the why of it is at the heart of this beautiful book. Wayne Hoffman throws himself into this old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting (a true education for budding journalists) because he wants to give his mother the gift of her history before he loses her completely to dementia. The book's portrayal of Alzheimer's is horrible and hilarious; Wayne's voice is warm, deeply loving, drily funny and thankfully unsentimental." -Marjorie Ingall, author of Mamaleh Knows Best "This is one of those rare, fine books that gives you two of the dearest gifts in a story so consuming you forget time, and an author with the gift to spin, from these supposedly ordinary lives, a profound chronicle of identity, family, memory, and love-and suspense, too." -Boris Fishman, author of Savage Feast "Wayne Hoffman has produced a fascinating and compelling story of his family history. Meticulously researched and skillfully written, he brilliantly weaves together the mystery of his great-grandmother's murder long ago in Winnipeg, his nearly decade long search to find the truth about this tragic event, and his joyous and poignant relationship with his ailing mother that inspires him and propels his quest. In particular, his recreation of Winnipeg's impoverished immigrant quarter during first decades of the twentieth century and the various complexities that shaped the lives of his great-grandparents and relatives is an absorbing tale rich with detail and vivid personalities." -Allan Levine, Winnipeg historian and author of Seeking the Fabled The Canadian Jewish Experience
"A murder mystery wrapped like a delicious knish around a familial love story. The End of Her is the story of a journalist attempting to solve the long-ago puzzle of who shot his great-grandmother in her bed in small-town Winnipeg in 1913. But the why of it is at the heart of this beautiful book. Wayne Hoffman throws himself into this old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting (a true education for budding journalists) because he wants to give his mother the gift of her history before he loses her completely to dementia. The book's portrayal of Alzheimer's is horrible and hilarious; Wayne's voice is warm, deeply loving, drily funny and thankfully unsentimental." -Marjorie Ingall, author of Mamaleh Knows Best "This is one of those rare, fine books that gives you two of the dearest gifts in a story so consuming you forget time, and an author with the gift to spin, from these supposedly ordinary lives, a profound chronicle of identity, family, memory, and love-and suspense, too." -Boris Fishman, author of Savage Feast "Wayne Hoffman has produced a fascinating and compelling story of his family history. Meticulously researched and skillfully written, he brilliantly weaves together the mystery of his great-grandmother's murder long ago in Winnipeg, his nearly decade long search to find the truth about this tragic event, and his joyous and poignant relationship with his ailing mother that inspires him and propels his quest. In particular, his recreation of Winnipeg's impoverished immigrant quarter during first decades of the twentieth century and the various complexities that shaped the lives of his great-grandparents and relatives is an absorbing tale rich with detail and vivid personalities." -Allan Levine, Winnipeg historian and author of Seeking the Fabled The Canadian Jewish Experience
- GenresMemoirNonfiction
304 pages, Paperback
Published February 15, 2022
17 people are currently reading
146 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
February 12, 2022
I really enjoyed this book. Its three threads (the history of the Jewish diaspora in Canada, the author's sorrow over his mother's decline into dementia, and the mystery of who murdered his great-grandmother more than one hundred years ago) form a fascinating narrative. I already knew Hoffman is an excellent storyteller from reading his other novels, but this novel outshines his earlier work and represents extensive research conducted over a number of years.
I highly recommend this to anyone interested in memoir, true crime, genealogy, and history.
I highly recommend this to anyone interested in memoir, true crime, genealogy, and history.
December 18, 2022
This is a deeply affecting work. I sank slowly into the literary seduction constructed here. There’s so many layers – the horrifying and emotional toll of Alzheimer’s on an individual and on a family, still balanced with humor and love. The mysterious conundrum of an unlikely murder in a pioneer town. The underlays of Jewish culture and Old West history (Canadian Prairie and Old West?) which color and inform the two major threads. I wondered if the story of someone else’s family past would be of interest to me, especially since the unsolved murder happened so long ago, but it was. Wayne Hoffman paints a vivid picture of these places from the early 1900s – Winnipeg, Canora – and the people who lived there, the immigrants to whom he’s related and their fellow citizens, whether they were Polish housekeepers, illiterate laborers, cops or others. Through what must have been painstaking research, we get a sense of how lives were recorded there and even more importantly for this story, how crimes were investigated (or not investigated) with the “primitive” tools law enforcement had at their disposal back then. There’s lots and lots of names and relatives – so bravo for the increasingly complicated family tree graphics that start chapters. Most of all though, reading a son’s account of how his mother loses him as he also loses her due to the disease course of Alzheimer’s is just devastating to read, while also being detailed and unsparing. There’s just something about non-fiction as a genre that a writer can have a profound intimacy with, particularly when the subjects mean so much, as they obviously do here. Highly recommended.
February 22, 2022
I'd call this 3 and a half stars... It was several threads that didn't really hang together. I was much more invested in the bittersweet story of his mother's decline, and less so in the family murder mystery. The mystery [part was interesting but there was so much of what seemed like filler.
September 8, 2022
I read a review of this book and the link to Winnipeg and a real life crime as well as a mother with dementia got my attention. I thoroughly enjoyed reading about the murder in Winnipeg in the North End where my mother grew up and Where I spent time with my grandparents who immigrated from Poland. I never knew there was a cemetery across from Kildonan Place! I could relate to the authors struggle with his mothers memory loss. The stages of dementia in his mother are very familiar to me. This story reminded me of the importance of having conversations with family about their history as well as documenting pictures with Who? Where? When?
June 19, 2022
MEMORY AND STORIES
In his three novels, Wayne Hoffman provides intriguing first lines to pull the reader into his stories. His recent nonfiction book, The End of Her: Racing against Alzheimer’s to Solve a Murder, is no exception. His first sentence is the following: “I was always my mother’s favorite.” He relates the story of his coming out to his parents when he is home from college during the summer of 1988. He has what he calls “the talk” with his mother while his father stays upstairs. By the next summer, his mother is much more comfortable with her gay son than she was the previous summer. Also, early in The End of Her, Hoffman writes about what an engaging storyteller his mother was. He must have inherited his talent for storytelling from his mother.
Throughout The End of Her, Hoffman alternates two stories. One is the story of his mother’s gradual decline into what eventually becomes Alzheimer’s. The other is the story of his great-grandmother’s unsolved murder. Hoffman’s great-grandmother immigrated from Russia to Canada in 1906 to escape the pogroms, married, and lived in Winnipeg. In the early morning of Friday, August 1, 1913, she was shot in the head while sleeping with her two-year-old daughter next to her. As Hoffman researches his great-grandmother’s murder, he writes: “[Her] murder wasn’t just a legend in my own family; it was truly a national story. Sarah Feinstein’s name was known all across Canada.”
The chapter titled “Passover to Passover” is my favorite chapter in The End of Her. With this chapter, Hoffman gives the reader a much-needed pause from the meticulous documentation of his research into his great-grandmother’s murder and from the intense and caring story of his mother’s decline from Alzheimer’s. He beautifully describes how the Passover celebration in his family changed over the years: “Over the next decade, our extended family around the Seder table—some two-dozen strong—grew more and more nontraditional: Interfaith couples came to outnumber the Jewish couples—and in my generation, every couple had one Jewish and one -non-Jewish partner [including Hoffman and his husband, Mark Sullivan].” At the end of this chapter, Hoffman writes: “Passover was now, first and foremost, about relationships.” This wonderful chapter should be published separately.
Wayne Hoffman’s talents as a journalist and as a novelist are at their peak in The End of Her. In A Note on Sources at the end of the book, Hoffman unforgettably writes: “This is, after all, a book about memory—my mother’s, and my own.”
In his three novels, Wayne Hoffman provides intriguing first lines to pull the reader into his stories. His recent nonfiction book, The End of Her: Racing against Alzheimer’s to Solve a Murder, is no exception. His first sentence is the following: “I was always my mother’s favorite.” He relates the story of his coming out to his parents when he is home from college during the summer of 1988. He has what he calls “the talk” with his mother while his father stays upstairs. By the next summer, his mother is much more comfortable with her gay son than she was the previous summer. Also, early in The End of Her, Hoffman writes about what an engaging storyteller his mother was. He must have inherited his talent for storytelling from his mother.
Throughout The End of Her, Hoffman alternates two stories. One is the story of his mother’s gradual decline into what eventually becomes Alzheimer’s. The other is the story of his great-grandmother’s unsolved murder. Hoffman’s great-grandmother immigrated from Russia to Canada in 1906 to escape the pogroms, married, and lived in Winnipeg. In the early morning of Friday, August 1, 1913, she was shot in the head while sleeping with her two-year-old daughter next to her. As Hoffman researches his great-grandmother’s murder, he writes: “[Her] murder wasn’t just a legend in my own family; it was truly a national story. Sarah Feinstein’s name was known all across Canada.”
The chapter titled “Passover to Passover” is my favorite chapter in The End of Her. With this chapter, Hoffman gives the reader a much-needed pause from the meticulous documentation of his research into his great-grandmother’s murder and from the intense and caring story of his mother’s decline from Alzheimer’s. He beautifully describes how the Passover celebration in his family changed over the years: “Over the next decade, our extended family around the Seder table—some two-dozen strong—grew more and more nontraditional: Interfaith couples came to outnumber the Jewish couples—and in my generation, every couple had one Jewish and one -non-Jewish partner [including Hoffman and his husband, Mark Sullivan].” At the end of this chapter, Hoffman writes: “Passover was now, first and foremost, about relationships.” This wonderful chapter should be published separately.
Wayne Hoffman’s talents as a journalist and as a novelist are at their peak in The End of Her. In A Note on Sources at the end of the book, Hoffman unforgettably writes: “This is, after all, a book about memory—my mother’s, and my own.”
August 19, 2022
I felt a very personal connection to this book and found it a compelling layering of the author’s emotional struggle with his mother’s decline from dementia, his attempts to try to solve the unsolved murder of his mother’s grandmother, and the Jewish culture of early Winnipeg that provided backdrop to the murder. My own mother died recently of cancer but was already well into the process of Alzheimer’s at the time, and I had been trying to solve some mysteries in our family history surrounding one of her great-great grandfathers. My cultural background is WASP, so very different issues than Hoffman’s family faced, but I found his contextualizing deeply interesting, too.
Hoffman describes Alzheimer’s with great accuracy and sensitivity. There’s much that I identified with, and at one point when he writes about how he could no longer share his research with his mother, I was brought to tears. Readers who complain that these threads don’t mesh really just don’t get it. When you have been so close to someone with whom you share all kinds of family history and stories but also the ins and outs of your work and the discoveries that you make, it is completely devastating when you can no longer do so. This is where deep loss resides. And the story that he uncovered and could no longer share with his mother, he has to share with someone—and that is us. It’s a great honor for us to receive the story that his mother could no longer hold, as well as to share the story of his mother and her demise, so that it will never be lost the way her grandmother’s was.
The only tiny thing that I wished for was that Hoffman might have traced the fates of those he ultimately held responsible for the murder. I would be curious to know what became of them. But perhaps that would have been too much of a distraction. It’s a heartfelt and satisfying book.
Hoffman describes Alzheimer’s with great accuracy and sensitivity. There’s much that I identified with, and at one point when he writes about how he could no longer share his research with his mother, I was brought to tears. Readers who complain that these threads don’t mesh really just don’t get it. When you have been so close to someone with whom you share all kinds of family history and stories but also the ins and outs of your work and the discoveries that you make, it is completely devastating when you can no longer do so. This is where deep loss resides. And the story that he uncovered and could no longer share with his mother, he has to share with someone—and that is us. It’s a great honor for us to receive the story that his mother could no longer hold, as well as to share the story of his mother and her demise, so that it will never be lost the way her grandmother’s was.
The only tiny thing that I wished for was that Hoffman might have traced the fates of those he ultimately held responsible for the murder. I would be curious to know what became of them. But perhaps that would have been too much of a distraction. It’s a heartfelt and satisfying book.
July 28, 2022
How wonderful to read a memoir by someone who loves his mother. That love comes through clearly in Wayne Hoffman’s “The End of Her: Racing Against Alzheimer’s to Solve a Murder” (Heliotrope Books). Except for a short time when he was coming to terms with his sexuality (Hoffman is gay), he and his mother, Susan, had a wonderful relationship. That’s why when Susan begins to suffer from dementia, he tries to solve a family murder in order to give them a common interest. The murder? His mother’s grandmother, Sarah, had been shot and killed in Winnipeg, Canada, in 1913 and no one was ever arrested. But Hoffman’s excellent work is more than a memoir and a murder mystery: it also offers insight into Canadian Jewish history.
See the rest of my review at https://www.thereportergroup.org/past...
See the rest of my review at https://www.thereportergroup.org/past...
March 21, 2022
I heard Wayne Hoffman, the executive editor of Tablet Magazine, talk about his new book The End of Her: Racing Against Alzheimer's to Solve a Murder on the Unorthodox podcast and I was intrigued. Hoffman utilizes his skills as a journalist to attempt to uncover the unsolved mystery behind the brutal murder of his great-grandmother in Winnipeg, Canada in 1913 at the same time that he is dealing with the decline of his mother from Alzheimer’s. It’s a little repetitive and redundant at times, but still super interesting and compelling. It reminded me of Who She Was: My Search for My Mother's Life by Samuel Freedman and The Almost Legendary Morris Sisters by Julie Klam.
October 23, 2022
I bought this book because I enjoy true crime stories and I have a special interest in Alzheimer’s since my mother had it. The book more than satisfied me on both counts but it was much more. It’s a fascinating portrait of the Jews in western Canada. Who knew there was such a significant Jewish presence in Saskatchewan in the early years of the twentieth century? Toronto and Montreal, yes, but Winnipeg and Calgary? Here’s a page turner, a love story between a man and his mother, and a history lesson all in fewer than 300 pages. Bravo!
July 18, 2022
I really enjoyed this book. As a true crime buff and a born and bred Winnipegger, the historical unsolved murder is what drew me to the story. But as I read further I became more invested in the present day story of Wayne’s mom.
From now on , whenever I’m driving in the north end and I pass Magnus Avenue, I will definitely have a thought and prayer for Sarah.
From now on , whenever I’m driving in the north end and I pass Magnus Avenue, I will definitely have a thought and prayer for Sarah.
March 28, 2022
This book started off really good, I found it hard to put down in the beginning but that urge tapered off at part 2.There are 3 different story lines to follow and around part 2 it became very overwhelming keeping up with each story.
April 25, 2022
I wasn't looking forward to reading about a murder, and - possible spoiler - I don't think it ever really gets resolved. But what's so good about the book is the author's discovery of family as he searches for family stories.
October 19, 2022
Way too long.
March 9, 2024
Vulnerable, sad, compelling, and kept me on the brink of tears the entire time.
May 11, 2025
I had a hard time reading some of the historical pieces due to its dryness- but that’s what I get for reading a historical story!
July 1, 2022
A little self-indulgent. Would have been a great Atlantic article about solving a family mystery or a non-fiction memoir about his mother's Alzheimer's. Combining these two tales made me feel like Mr Hoffman's therapist while he processes the very sad journey of his mother's illness - and a bored friend listening to the 6 degrees of separation of relations. I am certain his family loves this and-it will be a treasured piece of Hoffman memorabilia. Listening yo the audio book kept me busy on my many dog walks, but had I been reading I would have no doubt skipped large sections.
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews