An Echo in My Blood: The Search for My Family's Hidden Past,Books,0151002916,

	An Echo in My Blood: The Search for My Family's Hidden Past by Alan Weisman
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Product Details Binding Hardcover Dewey Decimal Number 977.60049240092 EAN 9780151002917 ISBN 0151002916 Manufacturer Harcourt Number Of Items 1 Number Of Pages 426 Publication Date October 15, 1999 Publisher Harcourt Availability Usually ships in 1-2 business days Product Description Throughout his childhood in Minneapolis, Alan Weisman was told that his grandfather was killed by Communists in the Ukraine at the turn of the century. When, as an adult, he meets a long-estranged uncle who tells a very different version of the story, Alan embarks on a search for the truth that takes him to the chemical ruin of Chernobyl and back in time to the Bolshevik Revolution. He discovers the paradoxical rationale for his father's vehement political and social conservatism as well as a more universal truth: that all immigrant families, in order to survive in a new world, must create protective family myths. One of these myths hides the true fate of his grandfather-a nightmare too terrible to express. At once an examination of his rootless generation and a look at the hopes and dreams of his forefathers, An Echo in My Blood takes you from the secret heart of an America you might not recognize to the pogroms of turn-of-the-century Kiev. For the children of Jewish immigrants who arrived in the U.S. in the early part of the 20th century, growing up American was both a fortune and a curse. A childhood free from pogroms and persecution came at the cost of a severed genealogy. Forced identity changes, destroyed documents and a reluctance to record the travails of the old country often left first-generation American Jews ignorant of their most immediate family history. Weisman (Gaviotas: A Village to Reinvent the World), a world-traveled journalist and the son of Ukrainian Jews who fled the massacres of the Russian Civil War in 1923, began his research while on assignment in Chernobyl. This book is his effort to come to terms with the disparity between his own privileged life and his father's struggle to make his name in a new country. Weisman weaves his childhood memories with the received stories of his many aunts and uncles. He then tackles the veracity of what he calls 'congenital truths' by returning to his father's birthplace of Mala Viska, a small village between Kiev and Odessa, where he tries to fill the gaps in his family's clouded history. Weisman's narrative sometimes risks becoming monotonous, as segments are weighed down by excessive detail and incongruous discourses on his research into environmental hazards in South America and an unlucky romance with an Argentine woman who shares his family name. But Weisman has a gift for language, and his personal search for family and identity will move anyone who recognizes the universality of love, loss and humanity. (Oct.) Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. In 1992, when Weisman's parents died, his aunt embraced him and his sister. 'Now you're orphans, just like us,' she murmured. A year later, in Chernobyl, he told a local official, 'You know, my father was...from [the] Ukraine.' At age 11, however, his father had fled to the United States after his father was assassinated. But was it the White Army Cossacks or the Bolsheviks (as his militantly anti-Communist father insisted) who murdered his grandfather? In this elegant memoir, Weisman ties together his complicated relationship with his oppressive father and his present job reporting on the 'unprecedented societal dislocation' taking place in the Third World today. The result is remarkable, sensitive history, where the present supplies meaning to the past, and the past provides context for the present. 'Displaced people create new histories, or revise old ones, to define themselves in alien settings,' observes Weisman. 'Family secrets can't really be keptAthe facts may dissolve away, but their consequences remain.' Highly recommended.ADavid Keymer, California State Univ., Stanislaus Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. Weisman, an award-winning freelance journalist, examines the parallels between the lifelong themes of his work--immigration, violence, and displacement--and the history of his family. Weisman grew up listening to his volatile, demanding father rail against the Communist murderers of his own father and the confiscation of the family's possessions in the Ukraine at the turn of the century. Years later, an estranged uncle tells a different story, and Weisman begins to explore his family's heritage, eventually traveling to Chernobyl to learn about a series of bloody pogroms that initiated his family's migration to the U.S. Weisman intersperses painful and revealing memories of his parents and family history with his own work of examining the impact of U.S. policies on underdeveloped nations and the formation of immigrant populations. After a lifetime of conflict with his now deceased father, Weisman makes peace with the tyrannical man, who dealt with his heritage of pain and wrenching upheaval by reinventing his family history to ensure his own survival. Vanessa Bush Everyones family history is endlessly fascinatingto them. To avoid boring a non-family member, however, requires either great skill as a storyteller or extremely colorful relatives. Journalist Weisman (Gaviotas: A Village to Reinvent the World, not reviewed), who has contributed to the Los Angeles Times and New York Times magazines, among others, sets himself a daunting task in his multigenerational chronicle of his familys journey from the Ukrainian shtetl to the Minnesota middle class. To the authors surprise, this upward march includes innumerable lies that his relatives told to each other and to themselves in order to survive and prosper. The consequences of these lies, both moral and practical, are at the heart of the family saga, which is dominated in the retelling by Weismans father: football hero, labor lawyer, political insider, and domestic tyrant. While his relationships with his family make for painful reading, Weisman skillfully conveys how his fathers character was shaped by a profound insecurity that allowed him to achieve traditional success but lessened him as a person. In reaching this insight, Weisman does what we all do when we reach adulthood: see our parents not as unassailable archetypes but as flawed human beings. As the French say, to understand all is to forgive all. Despite his attempt to understand his family heritage, Weisman seems a long way from fully forgiving. There is much unresolved bitterness here and an adolescent instinct to make himself the center of attention. In relating the discovery of his mothers long- hidden abortion, why else interject: How fathomless the loss. Because Id been there. Despite some fine writing and genuinely interesting social history, this exploration of the self through the lens of family history is too narrow a subject to sustain this lengthy narrative. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. ...remarkable, sensitive history, where the present supplies meaning to the past, and the past provides context for the present...Highly recommended. -- Library Journal, September 1, 1999 Throughout his childhood in Minneapolis, Alan Weisman was told that his grandfather was killed by Communists in the Ukraine at the turn of the century. When, as an adult, he meets a long-estranged uncle who tells a very different version of the story, Alan embarks on a search for the truth that takes him to the chemical ruin of Chernobyl and back in time to the Bolshevik Revolution. He discovers the paradoxical rationale for his father's vehement political and social conservatism as well as a more universal truth: that all immigrant families, in order to survive in a new world, must create protective family myths. One of these myths hides the true fate of his grandfather-a nightmare too terrible to express. At once an examination of his rootless generation and a look at the hopes and dreams of his forefathers, An Echo in My Blood takes you from the secret heart of an America you might not recognize to the pogroms of turn-of-the-century Kiev. A freelance journalist, Alan Weisman is the author of three other books, and his reports from around the world have appeared in the Los Angeles Times Magazine, Harper's, and the New York Times Magazine, among many others. He was a writer and an associate producer of National Public Radio's documentary series Vanishing Homelands, which won a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award. He lives in Sonoita, Arizona, with his wife, sculptor Beckie Kravetz. Customers who bought this item also bought The World Without Us Gaviotas: A Village to Reinvent the World--10th Anniversary Edition People of the Book: A Novel The Savage Detectives: A Novel Customer Reviews for: An Echo in My Blood: The Search for My Family's Hidden Past Rating - Fascinating account (despite the leftist agenda) Weisman is a good writer, with an amazing true story to tell. A journalist traveling to the Ukraine to investigate the Chernobyl disaster (an amazing story in its own right), he decides to visit his ancestral town of Elizavetgrad (Yelisavethgrad). This takes him on an unexpected odyssey of self-discovery and family history. His insights into Jewish life (in Chicago and Russia) are especially engaging. Some readers will tire of his sometimes relentless left-wing agenda, but I was glad I didn't ... Read More Rating - Serious items of 20th Cent I surpsed myself and finished this book as I was going to stop on several ocassions. His vinettes of imprtant history(the Russian civil war,the Chicago convention,the Unamerican Committee) were incredible. I take issue with the extent of his family history which was confusing and tiring. Rating - Our shared catastrophe and revelation How deeply moved my wife and I have been by this momentous, beautiful book, which both of us have found to be truly unforgettable. Echo in the blood, indeed. Weisman has found a way to widen a story that is essentially "personal" and familial by ramifying that story in multiple dimensions -- geo-politically, ecologically, historically and racially (the euphemism is "culturally," but this is a book that is unabashedly concerned with the complex meanings of racial inheritance). Most staggering to me are the ... Read More see more reviews See all books by author Alan Weisman

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