THE ANSWER TO A GRANDDAUGHTER'S QUESTION
The Jewish Immigrants' Story
and the History of an American Family
This is a book that was written to keep a promise. When Natalie Rothstein's granddaughter was ten years old, she asked a question familiar to many parents and grandparents: "Where do I come from?" Mrs. Rothstein, a writer with a particular interest in tracing her family roots, took the next five years to answer that question. The result is her new book, An American Family, which Governor Michael S. Dukakis calls "beautifully written and impressively researched. It tells the story of America and its immigrants as well as anything I have ever read."
The book tells how the American dream of freedom took hold amidst the harshness of life in Czarist Russia. It was a dream shared by many; more than two million Eastern European Jews struggled to get to the New World. Four of those people were Natalie Rothstein's grandparents. For the millions of Americans whose ancestors were part of that Great Migration at the turn of the century, this is their story.
Within the context of this general history and background, Mrs. Rothstein has set down a personal history from the shtetls of Russia to the neighborhoods of Boston. Following the writer's ancestors, we trace the cultural strains that take us through World War I, the prosperity of the twenties, the Depression of the thirties, Pearl Harbor, McCarthyism, up to the present. At the end of the book's journey, Natalie Rothstein takes a trip back to the village in Russia that her grandfather left a hundred years before.
The metamorphosis from immigrant family to American family is a shared experience. It is a tale that will resonate with all those who also ask the question, "Where do I come from?"
Visit Natalie Rothstein's website!
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Natalie Rothstein is a writer of features and fiction whose commentaries, short stories, and travel articles have appeared in numerous journals and publications including The Boston Globe, The Chicago Sun-Times, McCall's, The Writer, The Boston Herald and The London Sunday Express. She has also been a staff reporter for a suburban women's newspaper and Arts and Entertainment reporter for Brookline Cablevision. She lives in Brookline, Massachusetts, with her husband in a hundred-year-old Victorian home where they raised their three children. |
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