Longtime RVUUF Member Mitzi Loftus and her son David Present Their Book FROM THORNS to BLOSSOMS

Mitzi Asai Loftus, long time OLLI member and active participant of over 15 years at the Ashland Senior Center lunch and recreation programs, will do a second Ashland  appearance with her son, David, of Portland on Monday, August 19 at 6:30pm.

Ashland Together has invited them to speak as part of their monthly programs, with the gracious invitation to hold the event at Carpenter Hall on the OSF campus at 6:30pm. they will speak about her current book, FROM THORNS to BLOSSOMS, recently released by OSU Press. The subtitle, A Japanese American Family in War and Peace, describes her family story from her parents’ immigrant past in the early 1900s through the WWII incarceration of her family along with 120,000 other Japanese-Americans, while their sons/brothers all served in the armed forces before Pearl Harbor and throughout the war.

However, the aftermath of Mitzi’s return home to Hood River early in 1945 is the important focus of her particular experience as a young girl, which led from social isolation and loneliness causing her to unconsciously flee her Japanese heritage in silence only to regain pride in her heritage 12 years later by a turn of fortune.

This book is an expanded and improved version of her self-published book, MADE in JAPAN and SETTLED in OREGON of over thirty years ago. The book may be purchased at the reading event.