"The Lorches: The Rise and Fall of a Jewish Circus Dynasty" (upcoming book)
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"The Lorches: The Rise and Fall of a Jewish Circus Dynasty" (temporary title) is a creative nonfiction book combining circus history, archival research, and memoir. A Jewish circus artist reconstructs the history of the Lorch family, a Jewish circus dynasty that achieved international success across Europe and the Americas before its dispersal and destruction under the Nazi regime. Drawing on over a decade of archival work, interviews, and survivor testimony, the book documents their professional careers, family history, and wartime experiences, including a rescue by the Althoff Circus. Interwoven is the author’s perspective as a grandchild of Holocaust survivors, reflecting on inherited trauma, historical recovery, and the ethics and challenges of preserving fragmented family and performance histories.
Reading an excerpt from my book at "The Work of Writing: Ten New Voices", an event held at London's Jewish Book Week 2026
The Lorch family was circus royalty: world-renowned artists who toured across Europe and the Americas, becoming international stars. Their story is one of extraordinary artistic achievement and success, and also of rupture under the Nazi regime: the rescue of one branch by a German circus that hid them; members deported and murdered in the camps; and others who escaped to the United States and the United Kingdom.
This is not only a Holocaust narrative. While this particular chapter of the Lorch Family's history is explored in depth, the central aim is to return to how they lived, not only how they died: their work, artistry, physical intelligence, and the world they created inside and outside the circus ring. It is a story of performance, labour, ambition, and family life within a travelling culture now largely absent from memory.
This is not only a Holocaust narrative. While this particular chapter of the Lorch Family's history is explored in depth, the central aim is to return to how they lived, not only how they died: their work, artistry, physical intelligence, and the world they created inside and outside the circus ring. It is a story of performance, labour, ambition, and family life within a travelling culture now largely absent from memory.
Conducting research at Circus World's Parkinson Library, Baraboo WI, USA October 2025
The book weaves the Lorch family’s history with my own: how I chanced upon their story in 2013 through the obituary of Adolf Althoff; what compelled me to pursue it for over a decade; and the research, travel, and encounters that followed. What began as a small artistic inquiry became a long-term archival practice across Europe and beyond.
This book reconstructs the Lorch Family’s history through fragmented materials: archival records, press clippings, circus programmes, museum holdings, private collections, and interviews with descendants and researchers. Rather than seeking a singular, stabilised narrative, it engages with the gaps, absences, and inconsistencies that shape how marginalised histories are transmitted and remembered.
Underneath this reconstruction is my perspective as a third-generation descendant of Holocaust survivors and a Jewish circus artist and researcher, whose inherited history shapes artistic pursuit and engagement with fragmented archives. Researching the Lorches becomes inseparable from questions of memory, loss, and repair: what it means to approach another family’s fragmentation while carrying one’s own proximity to trauma, and how histories are written, disappear, and may be reassembled through embodied and archival attention.
This book reconstructs the Lorch Family’s history through fragmented materials: archival records, press clippings, circus programmes, museum holdings, private collections, and interviews with descendants and researchers. Rather than seeking a singular, stabilised narrative, it engages with the gaps, absences, and inconsistencies that shape how marginalised histories are transmitted and remembered.
Underneath this reconstruction is my perspective as a third-generation descendant of Holocaust survivors and a Jewish circus artist and researcher, whose inherited history shapes artistic pursuit and engagement with fragmented archives. Researching the Lorches becomes inseparable from questions of memory, loss, and repair: what it means to approach another family’s fragmentation while carrying one’s own proximity to trauma, and how histories are written, disappear, and may be reassembled through embodied and archival attention.
Serving as the Fall 2025 Fellow at The Milner Library's Circus & Allied Arts Collection at Illinois State University
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Serving as the Fall 2025 Fellow at The Milner Library's Circus & Allied Arts Collection at Illinois State University
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This book is part of a wider interdisciplinary project documenting and commemorating Jewish circus artists and families. It includes the show “The Escape Act”, lectures, workshops, and a travelling exhibition. The book is the most sustained form of this work to date, allowing space for complexity and historical depth that cannot be contained in performance or lectures alone.
Ultimately, the book seeks to restore presence to a family whose legacy has been largely lost, and to consider how cultural memory survives: through archives, performance, and the ongoing act of return.
Ultimately, the book seeks to restore presence to a family whose legacy has been largely lost, and to consider how cultural memory survives: through archives, performance, and the ongoing act of return.
