Forgetting Fathers

An eloquent personal reflection on the fascination of family history and the desire to both discover and escape origins. In Forgetting Fathers, David Marshall weaves together the stories of his grandfather and great-grandfather with his own quest to solve the mystery of his family’s past. Beginning as a search for his lost family name, Marshall attempts to understand the origins of his grandfather, who spent part of his childhood in the Hebrew Orphan Asylum of the City of New York. He also reconstructs the life and death of his great-grandfather, a Russian immigrant tailor who died at age thirty-six in a private sanitarium dedicated to the treatment of mental and nervous diseases. The narrative becomes a detective story that reflects on our ambivalence about origins, the relation between history and mourning, and the compulsion to search for life stories. Forgetting Fathers combines historical accounts based on records, reports, and public documents with autobiographical reflections and speculations. Included throughout are photographs, newspaper clippings, and facsimiles of original documents that provide a sense of both the texture of the times and the fabric of archival and genealogical research. “One of our most gifted literary scholars, David Marshall in Forgetting Fathers has written an un-forgettable detective story born in a deeply felt, personal quest to solve the mystery of his grandfather’s name. The result is not only an absorbing read; it is a profound testament to the human impulse to know who we are and from whence we came. For Marshall, that secret was locked a century ago in the Hebrew Orphan Asylum of the City of New York, and in his odyssey to find—and turn—the key, Marshall becomes the living proof of Eudora Welty’s timeless line, ‘Remembering is done through the blood.’” — Henry Louis Gates Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, Harvard University “Forgetting Fathers is a truly remarkable piece of work. The pertinacity of Marshall as a reader, as a critic, as a theorist, impels him on his quest to learn all that he can about his past. The book is riveting.” — Jonathan Freedman, coeditor of Jewish in America “From the Hebrew Orphan Asylum to the history of New York tailors, David Marshall weaves his Jewish family memoir with gripping details. An enlightening contribution to the growing body of research on the lives and institutions of twentieth- century Jewish immigrants.” — Mikhal Dekel, author of The Universal Jew: Masculinity, Modernity, and the Zionist Moment

An eloquent personal reflection on the fascination of family history and the desire to both discover and escape origins. In Forgetting Fathers, David Marshall weaves together the stories of his grandfather and great-grandfather with his own quest to solve the mystery of his family’s past. Beginning as a search for his lost family name, Marshall attempts to understand the origins of his grandfather, who spent part of his childhood in the Hebrew Orphan Asylum of the City of New York. He also reconstructs the life and death of his great-grandfather, a Russian immigrant tailor who died at age thirty-six in a private sanitarium dedicated to the treatment of mental and nervous diseases. The narrative becomes a detective story that reflects on our ambivalence about origins, the relation between history and mourning, and the compulsion to search for life stories. Forgetting Fathers combines historical accounts based on records, reports, and public documents with autobiographical reflections and speculations. Included throughout are photographs, newspaper clippings, and facsimiles of original documents that provide a sense of both the texture of the times and the fabric of archival and genealogical research. David Marshall is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has published widely on the history of the novel, aesthetics, and autobiography.

Diaries of a Forgotten Parent: Divorced Dads on Fathering Through and Beyond Divorce opens an intimate window on the lives of divorced men. Literature on divorce focuses primarily on its effects on women and children, but fair and personal accounts of the lived experiences of custodial and non-custodial fathers are less available. In this highly accessible text, ten American men share intensely personal reflections of guilt, pain, frustration, sacrifice, loneliness and pride. The men do not see themselves as exemplary; rather, their stories are graphically honest, revealing what Paterson calls ordinary men “with all their warts.” The author reviews significant works on the male experience of divorce from psychological, legal, educational and sociological experts, interspersing commentary and research with the men’s own voices. From the initial discussion of why men marry and why they divorce through the men’s painful memories of being pushed out of their children’s lives by angry and resentful mothers, the author illuminates the legal, fiscal, emotional and practical experiences of men struggling to reinvent their fathering while they find themselves reconfigured into deserters, deadbeats and visitors. The societal myth that fathers are less valuable parents than mothers is thoroughly deconstructed in this text. The book will help divorced and divorcing men and those who work with them to fully understand the experiences of fathers who never stopped loving and caring for their children, in spite of the fact that the contributions of fathers are still largely discounted by schools, courts, and worst of all, by their children’s mothers. From this book, readers will understand that there are just too many reasons why fathers must never be forgotten in the lives of their children.

In this remarkable book, Charles P. Pierce intertwines two dramatic stories-the scientific race to discover the causes of Alzheimer's and the moving experiences of the Pierce family as they struggle with the disease. More than four million Americans develop Alzheimer's every year, just as Charles Pierce's father did-horrifically and genetically-and in Hard to Forget, Pierce takes us deep into the country of this disease, to explore how it affects both the body and a family. When his father is diagnosed with Alzheimer's, the author goes on a quest to discover everything he can about the disease. He discusses here Dr. Alois Alzheimer's work early in the twentieth century, then shows how Watson and Crick's announcement of the double-helix structure of DNA opened up the field of Alzheimer's research and led to discoveries by the "genome cowboys"-Dr. Allen Roses, Dr. Peter Hyslop, and others-of the genetic components of the disease. At the heart of this book, too, is the powerful, emotional story of how the Pierce family coped with Alzheimer's and with the threat that the author-and his children-might also inherit it. Elegant and richly informative, Hard to Forget is a unique and provocative book.