An American Family - Softcover

A book of personal history +the Jewish immigrant experience.
"Where do I come from, Gramma,?" my 10-year-old granddaughter asked. It was that question that prompted my search for personal history and became the basis for this book. I didn't know what answers I might find or where the search would take me. But I was a writer, I was interested in genealogy and I wanted to explore the background of my family. Beyond that, I wanted to understand more of what the immigrant experience meant. I came to believe that it is, in many ways, the central story of this nation. As President Franklin D. Roosevelt once said, "we are all...descended from immigrants..." The metamorphosis from immigrant family to American family is, indeed, a common tale. But there is nothing common about those who lived it. For my people, as for so many others, the American dream of freedom took hold amidst the harshness of life in Czarist Russia. It was a dream shared by many; as part of the Great Migration at the turn of the century more than two million Eastern European Jews struggled to get to the New World. Four of them were my grandparents. The book follows my family as they put down roots in the neighborhoods of Boston. My parents came of age and married during the turbulent 1920s. The story charts my own emergence as a second-generation American growing up during the Depression and World War II. As I neared the end of the book, I made a journey of discovery back to the Old Country, to the village my grandfather left 100 years before. No Jews remain. What migration began, the Holocaust finished. For me and for so many others, there is grateful remembrance of ancestors who left in order to seek a better life. We are the inheritors of that life. Writing this book, I have become aware that researching family roots has become a major interest for millions of Americans. This book is for them and for anybody who ever asked the question, "where do I come from?"