Lately, I’ve been reading books by historians
who use their historian skills to tell stories about their own lives. I’m trying to do that myself about my own
life.
So, I loved the way Guterl thought deeply about the family he grew up
with in the 1970s and 80s and especially how his parents tried, with very mixed
success, to create a family that brought together children of different racial
backgrounds. With very sensitive
portrayals of his parents and siblings, Guterl shows how this intentional
upbringing could produce personal pains and pleasures.
Could a picturesque white house with a picket fence save the world? What if it was filled with children drawn together from around the globe? And what if, within the yard, the lines of kin and skin, of family and race, were deliberately knotted and twisted? In 1970, a wild-eyed dreamer, Bob Guterl, believed it could.
Bob was determined to solve, in one stroke, the problems of overpopulation and racism. The charming, larger-than-life lawyer and his brilliant wife, Sheryl, a former homecoming queen, launched a radical experiment to raise their two biological sons alongside four children adopted from Korea, Vietnam,…
This was another incredible book in which a historian looked back at her
childhood and focused on one specific traumatic event from her past, the time
she and her sister were on a plane that was hijacked en route from Tel Aviv to
New York City.
Hodes not only used her
skills as a researcher to recreate the events of the hijacking in mesmerizing
detail, she also movingly revealed the personal traumas she endured during and
after the ordeal, especially as she came to realize how much she had suppressed
the event in her own consciousness.
In this moving and thought-provoking memoir, a historian offers a personal look at the fallibilities of memory and the lingering impact of trauma as she goes back fifty years to tell the story of being a passenger on an airliner hijacked in 1970.
On September 6, 1970, twelve-year-old Martha Hodes and her thirteen-year-old sister were flying unaccompanied back to New York City from Israel when their plane was hijacked by members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and forced to land in the Jordan desert. Too young to understand the sheer gravity of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Martha…
I think I literally read this book in one sitting. If I didn’t, that was only because I didn’t
want the book to end.
The author,
another historian, tells a hugely moving story about her mother, a Jewish
immigrant in New York in the 1930s, who struggled to make her way as a young
woman. Because she immigrated alone, she
was also separated from her parents and siblings.
Through occasional letters that go back and
forth, Faderman’s mother dreams about reuniting her family in New York but
ultimately comes to learn about the tragedies her parents and siblings endure
at the hands of anti-semites and Nazi invaders. I was riveted by Faderman’s portrayal
of her mother, a woman I felt I had read about repeatedly in history books but
who came to life in such a moving and personal way.
An acclaimed writer on her mother’s tumultuous life as a Jewish immigrant in 1930s New York and her life-long guilt when the Holocaust claims the family she left behind in Latvia
A story of love, war, and life as a Jewish immigrant in the squalid factories and lively dance halls of New York’s Garment District in the 1930s, My Mother’s Wars is the memoir Lillian Faderman’s mother was never able to write. The daughter delves into her mother’s past to tell the story of a Latvian girl who left her village for America with dreams of a life on the…
This book defies easy classification. Is it about the Civil War? The New Deal?
Both? More than anything, I’m interested in historical memory and how people in
one era –the 1930s and 40s – look back to another era – the Civil War – in
order to make sense of their present circumstances. It wasn’t a coincidence
that Americans living in the 30s and 40s spent a lot of time thinking about,
reading about, and watching movies (think Gone with the Wind!) about the
Civil War. By thinking about events and people from that earlier era, Americans
during the New Deal began to reimagine issues related to big government; civil
rights; as well as war and overseas entanglements.
