Learning Life: A Memoir is the first volume of an unconventional memoir from the highly original educator and writer, Sylvia Baer. Through essays, photographs, and poems-many of which were online sensations during the pandemic, shared worldwide on social media-Baer tells the stories of five generations of her remarkable family.

With great grandparents who lived under pogroms in Eastern Europe; grandparents who escaped the Holocaust to Uruguay, where she was born; a grandfather who was a celebrated engineer and German immigrant to the United States in the 1920s; parents from diverse cultures and languages; her own United States immigrant experiences in the late 1950s; and stories of the many people who helped, guided, and influenced her during her childhood, Baer tells her own family's story, an American story, and a universal human story. Vivid family photographs illuminate Baer's lovely, compelling essays.

An expert on the poetry of 19^th century American poet Emily Dickinson, Baer has chosen and placed lines from Dickinson's poems throughout the book, to reflect and amplify the insights of her own essays.