The Family Koenig

By: Andrew Friede

Narrated by: Tara Kulkarni

The Family Koenig is a historical novel about several generations of physicians in a Jewish family during the core years of the 20th century. It is a gripping book that is rich with historical detail that contains love stories, abandonment, wars, murders and suicides; and yet is a meditation on how its physicians find inner strength, become true healers, and find and nurture love.

There is a female Jewish gynecologist who performs illegal abortions while her psychiatrist husband plots how to protect them from the gathering storm; their daughter, a female surgeon in WWII Paris who masquerades as a blond gentile and calmy murders anyone who gets in her way; a young female ob-gyn at Johns Hopkins who triumphs over a deeply troubled childhood; and her fiancé, a curmudgeonly, weightlifting neurosurgeon who together with his Argentinian psychiatrist mother solves the horrific cold-case death at the core of the novel.

The Family Koenig vividly demonstrates the power of psychiatry to help those who seem irredeemably wounded by the ravages of war, prejudice, and their own demons, to go on to do deeply meaningful work – and ensure that love triumphs.

©2025 Andrew Friede (P)2025 Andrew Friede