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Forgetting Fathers: Untold Stories from an Orphaned Past

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How do our family histories shape who we are, and what can they reveal about our past and ourselves? David Marshall delves into a personal detective story that uncovers the mysterious histories of his ancestors through a richly detailed exploration of archival records and family lore.

Image courtesy of interviewee. November 22, 2024

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This video is a talk by a scholar who specializes in 18th-century fiction, aesthetics, and moral philosophy, with a focus on autobiography and the early novel. The speaker discusses their personal project related to their family's history, particularly the search for their ancestral origins and the complexities surrounding their family name, Marshall, which was believed to have been Americanized from an immigrant name.

The narrative intertwines themes from 18th-century literature, particularly the motifs of orphans and the quest for identity, with the speaker's exploration of their grandfather's past. They reflect on the impact of familial loss, heritage, and the act of uncovering personal and historical narratives through archival research.

The speaker undertakes a detective-like approach to their genealogical search, emphasizing how personal histories can be inscribed in public records. They share insights about using archives, the challenges of immigrant identity, and how personal stories connect to larger social histories.

The book they discuss, titled "Forgetting Fathers," emerges as a blend of literary nonfiction, detective story, and memoir, illustrating the author's journey through grief and the quest for understanding lost heritage. The narrative portrays a complex interplay of memory, historical context, and the process of writing as an act of mourning, culminating in a reflection on the legacies of forgotten fathers and the stories that shape personal identity.

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Here are five key points from the video:

1. **Interest in 18th and 19th Century Literature**: The author is a scholar focused on 18th-century fiction, aesthetics, and moral philosophy, with a particular interest in the genre of autobiography within early novels, exploring how these narratives often relate to themes of identity and self-invention.

2. **Personal Quest for Family Origins**: The author embarks on a personal journey to uncover their familial history, motivated by the mystery surrounding their family name, "Marshall," which was believed to be Americanized. This search leads to deeper reflections on themes of loss, memory, and identity.

3. **Research Process and Archival Work**: The narrative emphasizes the detective-like process of researching family history, including using both traditional archival work and modern digital resources, like Google Books and genealogy sites, to piece together fragmented family stories.

4. **Themes of Loss and Mourning**: The author highlights a central theme of the book as the exploration of lost and forgotten fathers, framing the writing process as an act of mourning that connects personal history to broader social narratives, particularly regarding the historical convideo of immigration and family structures.

5. **Artistic Approach to Nonfiction**: The author discusses the intention behind the book as a work of literary nonfiction that creatively integrates personal and historical narratives. It is not merely a linear recounting of facts but a dramatization of the search process itself, exploring the interplay between personal identity and public history.

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Here are some key quotes extracted from the video that capture its main themes and ideas:

1. **On Autobiography and First-Person Narratives**:
"I've been particularly interested in ... the genre of autobiography in the 18th century novel and in the 19th century novel as well."

2. **On the Search for Origins**:
"I ended up getting involved in this particular book, which had to do with a search for my own origin, so to speak."

3. **On the Themes of Orphanhood in 18th Century Novels**:
"The 18th century novel ... often talks about orphans ... about the search for origins or about the kind of invention of the self."

4. **On the Nature of the Book**:
"I think that broadly construed, you could say that this was a work of literary nonfiction ... It's part history, part detective story."

5. **On Personal and Familial History**:
"I was told that Marshall was not really the family name ... but when I asked my father ... they said they didn't know."

6. **On the Significance of Loss**:
"I did become very interested in the loss of fathers in remembering fathers ... why this family history was actually repressed, not just forgotten."

7. **On Archival Research**:
"I did a fair amount of archival work when I could ... discovering that all of their archives were in the center for Jewish history."

8. **On the Intersection of Personal and Public Records**:
"I became very interested in how the personal was inscribed in the public and in the historical."

9. **On the Challenges of Genealogical Research**:
"Part of the challenge ... was that not only did people change their names, but there was no standardized spelling, no standardized transliteration."

10. **On Family Trauma**:
"It appeared that the father died in a sanitarium for nervous disorders ... a very difficult family history."

11. **On the Act of Writing as Mourning**:
"I began to realize that it also was a kind of act of mourning ... the book itself was an act of mourning, and it begins in the orphanage."

12. **On the Nature of the Book's Narrative**:
"I sort of try to talk about what it means to have this kind of quest and how one reconstructs from these kind of documents."

These quotes effectively encapsulate the speaker's exploration of autobiography, family history, the process of genealogical research, and the emotional journey tied to understanding one's origins.

X-TIMESTAMP-MAP=LOCAL:00:00:00.000,MPEGTS:90000

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Am a scholar of 18th century fiction and aesthetics

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and moral philosophy.

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And I've been particularly interested in my work,

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in the kind of genre of autobiography in the 18th century

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novel and in the 19th century novel as well.

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And so I've been very interested in

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what I sometimes describe as the fictions of autobiography

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and the way that the early novel was always written in the

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first person, as a memoir,

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and often presented as an actual memoir as opposed

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to a, a novel.

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But I ended up getting involved in this particular,

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book, which had to do with a search

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for my own origin, so to speak.

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Um, I was very much sort of informed by

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that whole, history of the 18th century novel,

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which itself is often about orphans.

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It often talks about, problems

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of genealogy.

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Um, often, you know, 18th century French or,

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or British novel will begin with an,

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a child found in a carriage and with the parents killed.

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And, there's, you know, there's sort of this mystery

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of whether the child is of noble blood or, or, or not.

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Um, and very often the novels are about the search

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for origins or about the kind of invention of the self.

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And in the 18th century, that invention

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of the self was also related to the kind of rise

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of the middle class and a kind of new sense of, of,

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of class mobility.

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Um, interestingly, the genealogy of the novel itself is kind

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of inscribed in some of these personal stories

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because the novel was seen as a kind

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of illegitimate genre.

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It was not seen as, literature per se.

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Um, so all of those questions were very much kind of,

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in my mind and in my history as I started to think about

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another story of origins

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and of, kind of construction of, of the self

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and trying to solve some of the, the mysteries of,

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of my own, past my father, my grandfather,

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my grand great-grandfather.

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I thought a lot about the question of genre.

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I think that broadly construed, you could say

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that this was a work of literary nonfiction.

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Um, it is autobiographical,

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but it's not really so much about my life.

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It's really,

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in some ways it's autobiographical in the sense

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that it's about this particular search.

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Um, so I,

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don't give a lot of details about my own life,

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but I'm very much as I am,

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Undertaking what is kind of a detective story,

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which I guess is another relevant genre to,

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to what the book is.

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It's part history, part detective story.

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It's also about my own quest, my own search.

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And it has a lot of reflections on, that process.

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And I, in many ways try to dramatize,

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not just the facts of what I've, what I'm uncovering,

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but the search itself and what it means to go in archives

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and to try to reconstruct a past from documents.

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I guess I should say that the book has its origins

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in a mystery about our family name.

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So I grew up, you know, with the name David Marshall,

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and I knew, my, my father's father,

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my grandfather had died before I was born, shortly

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before I was born.

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And so I was named after him, which is part of the,

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the Jewish tradition.

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Um, and, I was told that

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Marshall was not really the, the family name,

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because, it was very common

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for immigrant names, foreign names to be Americanized.

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Sometimes that would happen at Ellis Island,

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even if the people didn't know it

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or wanted it to be happening,

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because some, you know,

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immigration agent would just change

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the spelling of their name.

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But this was a time when people were not necessarily proud

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of their past and their background,

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but very much wanted to kind of become Americanized.

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But when I asked my, father

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and my grandfather, well, what was the name

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before it was Marshall, they said they didn't know.

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And I found that very strange in a way.

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I said, you mean you never asked your father

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or your husband what the name had been?

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And they said, well,

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he had been in an orphanage when he was young,

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and he didn't like to talk about the past

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and know they had never asked.

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So periodically I would begin,

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to, to look.

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Um, this was even before kind of ancestry.com

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and family history and genealogy became really popular,

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and I always hit dead ends.

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I never could, could find it, but then I would go back

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and look again.

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And after my father died,

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I think I became particularly, invested in this

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quest for some reason.

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But I also became very interested, perhaps in my own kind

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of acts of mourning in thinking about what it meant

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for my grandfather to have

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lost his father when he was, you know, 10 or 11

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and be sent to an orphanage.

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Um, so that's really what kind of led me.

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And eventually it was intellectually interesting to me.

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It was personally interesting to me,

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but it also became a kind of obsession in a way

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that I was compelled

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To pursue.

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I mean, often in my scholarship,

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I sometimes get involved in these detective stories

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of trying to understand what author, read another author

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and, you know, to uncover some

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of the historical context of, of something.

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But in this case, I think I did get very kind of intrigued

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by, these questions and,

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and the kind of, historical

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detective work in trying to uncover them.

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But I do think that, you know, it, you know,

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the book is called Forgetting Fathers,

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and I did become very interested in the loss of fathers

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in remembering fathers.

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And then more and more kind of intrigued in the question

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of why this family history was actually repressed,

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not just forgotten,

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but, repressed in in some ways that this was a past

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that they didn't want to remember.

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I did a fair amount of, of archival work when I could.

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Um, I live in California.

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A lot of these records were, in New York

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and the New York Public Library,

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but also in the, center for, for Jewish history.

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And my grandfather

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and his brothers had been

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in a very well-known orphanage called the Hebrew Orphan

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Asylum of New York.

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And I discovered that all

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of their archives were in the center for,

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for Jewish history, collection.

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So when I could, I did travel there,

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and eventually I did uncover some important, documents.

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But I started this in the years

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after, the kind of Google Books project began

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to digitize a lot of material.

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And, there's kind of an interesting history in

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that project too, because when they began that

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and they began to partner with a lot of,

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university libraries and,

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and public libraries, they had to have books

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that were in the public domain, not under copyright,

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but also of a certain size and shape

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because of the scanning machines that they had at that time.

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And it turns out that a lot of the books

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that were digitized from university libraries

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and New York Public Librarian

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and other places around the country were, kind

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of public documents.

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And in the early years of, the,

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the 20th century, around the turn of, of,

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of the last century,

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there was a huge social reform movement,

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particularly in New York,

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but elsewhere, where the state really tried to

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regulate, sweatshops, factories,

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orphan asylums, sanitariums.

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Um, and part of that was an almost kind

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of French bureaucratic effort to document

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and inventory everything.

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And I discovered that there were all of these reports,

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annual reports, the report of the factory inspector

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of the State of New York, reports on,

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what were called, lunacy,

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a Asylums.

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Um, and all of those books had been digitized

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because they just happened to be convenient.

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So since I couldn't,

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because of my work, my, as a professor

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and an administrator, I didn't have time

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to just spend a year

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or two traveling around looking at archives.

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I would often late at night find these, reports.

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Um, and then of course, ancestry

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and the, also the, family search,

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archives of the, latter Day Saints,

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and newspapers more

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and more became, became digitized as well.

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So a combination of old fashioned archival work,

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but also a huge amount of material just then beginning

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to show up on the internet.

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But it took a lot of detective work also

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because you couldn't, it wasn't obvious how

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to find these things or even what the search terms would be,

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and they often weren't searchable.

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You often had to kind of look through thousands of pages

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of A PDF and try to figure out where something might be.

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I became very interested in how the personal

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was inscribed in the public and in the historical.

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So, you know, I've done research on

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what we would now describe as famous authors, you know,

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George Elliot or Adam Smith,

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or, you know, others like that.

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And so there are papers, there are archives,

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but here I was searching for forgotten people

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who were ordinary people.

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They were, they have no archives per se.

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They were not historical figures.

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So I became very interested in how much one could find,

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and some of the reports

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and documents that I was mentioning, you know, as well

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as birth certificates, marriage certificates,

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death certificates and things like that, how much the,

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you could find the, the,

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these personal stories inscribed in the public record.

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And every record I found, like a birth certificate

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or a death certificate turned out to be a document

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that one could read almost like a literary text,

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not in the sense of, you know, trying

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to make up interpretations,

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but I became very interested in every name that was there,

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the name of a witness on a marriage certificate, the name

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of the doctor on the death certificate

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of my great-grandfather.

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And, that turned out to be a key,

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which opened up multiple other stories.

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So the, the other thing that I,

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then got involved with was trying to understand

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what historical context was needed

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to understand the personal story.

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So I did a lot of research on the Taylor Strike

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of 1894 on the Lower East Side in New York,

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and, you know, labor history, history of psychiatry.

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Um, so those personal stories then opened up into larger

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social, stories that I needed to unpack in order

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to understand, what the experience

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of my great-grandfather and his family would've been.

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You're dealing with, public records

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that are scattered about, you have to find clues.

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And then one of the challenges in particular

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with immigrants is that

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not only did people change their names,

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but there was no standardized spelling,

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no standardized trans transliteration.

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Um, so part of the challenge of my trying

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to find the original family name was

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that it was spelled about 12 different ways,

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even under the best of of circumstances,

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and often misspelled with the wrong first, initial.

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I had to develop sort of ways of searching

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for those things as well.

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Um, so it was a particular, kind

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of unstable category when you're, you know,

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when you're looking at that experience of immigrant at

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that time, when again, the state is just beginning to try

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to document, all of this, whereas, you know,

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in the 18th century, it was a lot easier for people

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to change their names and make up new identities

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and reinvent themselves.

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Um, but at, but,

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but here, so I became interested in, you know,

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when were the first driver's licenses

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instituted in New York?

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Well, it was actually right around this time,

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and you know, today we have photocopy machines, not

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to mention, you know, scanning and, and documents.

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And at that time, you know, people didn't have a copy

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of their birth certificate.

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They didn't have a copy of, of, of any

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of those documents.

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So you, it was just a, a, a moment when the state,

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was really trying to, to sort

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of keep track of things.

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Whereas today, of course, you know, everything is, is,

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is documented with identity checks

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and social security numbers and passwords and all of that.

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My grandfather, was, from

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a family with five children.

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And, well, he had, right,

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there were three boys and, and two girls.

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And the youngest was born after his father died.

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And, his mother couldn't take care

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of the children when the father died.

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So they were sent to this Hebrew orphan asylum.

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Um, and in fact, at that orphan asylum, about 70%

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of the children there had a living parent,

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but they were there because they were indigent,

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and they couldn't, the, the families couldn't,

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take, take care of them.

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But I also then uncovered that it wasn't simply

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that the father died and they were destitute,

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but it appeared that the father died in a sanitarium

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for nervous disorders.

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Um, and that's where my kind of research on, you know,

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what was called lunacy, you know, began

300
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and I began to reconstruct a kind of tumultuous past

301
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of the father,

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and, to imagine that there had been a,

303
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a very difficult family history where, the,

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the history of the father was perhaps scandalous,

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disgraceful, but,

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or at least traumatic enough, that no one really wanted

307
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to, to remember it had been working on this, project

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on and off, you know, for some years, just as a kind

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of occasional hobby.

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After my father died,

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I did find myself drawn towards it more.

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And I mean, I think that probably when I really

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discovered I was writing a book,

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because at some point I was doing the research

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and I just started writing.

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And the book begins by picturing the scene

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of my grandfather, in the orphanage receiving a Bible,

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which I inherited that has that name on it,

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and trying to reconstruct that scene,

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and, trying to imagine his experience.

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And so when I really realized I was writing a book

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and then started doing it in earnest

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and really trying to, to work on it, as much as I could,

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I began to realize that it also

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was a kind of act of mourning.

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And then in some ways, the book was about lost fathers

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and forgotten fathers,

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forgetting fathers, remembering fathers.

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Um, so I began to realize,

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I suppose one could say perhaps it's an over simplification,

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that there was some therapeutic aspect for me in writing it.

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But I do think,

333
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but it was something that I became interested in

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as I was writing how the book itself was an act of,

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of mourning, and it begins in the orphanage, at

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what today we, we would call a bar mitzvah, where,

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where my grandfather is presented, a bible

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that has his name on it.

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And that itself was a kind of mystery,

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and the book ends in a cemetery where I was trying

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to find the grave of my great-grandfather.

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Um, and, so it, really all of that, you know, kind

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of, experience of death and,

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and mourning is inscribed in the,

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the writing of the book itself.

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I do hope that the story itself is interesting

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and, I,

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When I published the book, I was invited

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by various genealogical societies to talk.

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And so I do think that people are interested in that type

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of research and in that,

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but I also, took

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seriously the notion that this is a work of literary

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nonfiction that is, excuse me,

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inscribed in the history of the novel.

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I've also been invited at times to speak on panels

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about writing about the self, the history of memoir,

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the history of, of autobiography.

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So I'm hoping that the book is compelling itself,

360
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and I did purposely write it as a kind

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of detective story that dramatizes the search.

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I don't simply tell it in a linear narrative

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and begin by saying, here's everything I found out,

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and now I'm gonna reconstruct the, the history of,

365
00:18:47.205 --> 00:18:48.385
of these characters,

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but rather, I sort of try to talk about what it means

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to have this kind of quest

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and how one reconstructs from these kind of documents.

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And I tried to be very scrupulous about where I was

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speculating and where I was interpreting

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and where I was simply reporting, the record.

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This is not a work of historical fiction.

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Um, so I really tried to, there is speculation in it

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that I kind of label as such,

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or I'm trying to imagine the character, so to speak, of my,

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my, my family.

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Uh, but I, am always interested in that,

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that process of, that, that act of historical research,

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but also that act of imagination.

Exploring Autobiography in 18th Century Fiction

00:00:00 - Am a scholar of 18th century fiction and aesthetics and moral philosophy. And I've been particularly interested in my work, in the kind of genre of autobiography in the 18th century novel and in the 19th century novel as well. And so I've been very interested in what I sometimes describe as the fictions of autobiography and the way that the early novel was always written in the first person, as a memoir,

00:00:34 - to a, a novel. But I ended up getting involved in this particular, book, which had to do with a search for my own origin, so to speak. I was very much sort of informed by that whole, history of the 18th century novel, which itself is often about orphans. It often talks about, problems

00:01:04 - often, you know, 18th century French or, or British novel will begin with an, a child found in a carriage and with the parents killed. And, there's, you know, there's sort of this mystery of whether the child is of noble blood or, or, or not. and very often the novels are about the search for origins or about the kind of invention of the self. And in the 18th century, that invention

Exploring Identity and Genre: A Personal Quest

00:01:38 - of the middle class and a kind of new sense of, of, of class mobility. interestingly, the genealogy of the novel itself is kind of inscribed in some of these personal stories because the novel was seen as a kind of illegitimate genre. It was not seen as, literature per se. so all of those questions were very much kind of, in my mind and in my history as I started to think about

00:02:11 - and of, kind of construction of, of the self and trying to solve some of the, the mysteries of, of my own, past my father, my grandfather, my grand great-grandfather. I thought a lot about the question of genre. I think that broadly construed, you could say that this was a work of literary nonfiction. it is autobiographical, but it's not really so much about my life.

00:02:42 - in some ways it's autobiographical in the sense that it's about this particular search. so I, don't give a lot of details about my own life, but I'm very much as I am, Undertaking what is kind of a detective story, which I guess is another relevant genre to, to what the book is. It's part history, part detective story. It's also about my own quest, my own search.

Unraveling Family Mysteries: The Search for Identity

00:03:16 - And I, in many ways try to dramatize, not just the facts of what I've, what I'm uncovering, but the search itself and what it means to go in archives and to try to reconstruct a past from documents. I guess I should say that the book has its origins in a mystery about our family name. So I grew up, you know, with the name David Marshall,

00:03:47 - my grandfather had died before I was born, shortly before I was born. And so I was named after him, which is part of the, the Jewish tradition. and, I was told that Marshall was not really the, the family name, because, it was very common for immigrant names, foreign names to be Americanized. Sometimes that would happen at Ellis Island,

00:04:16 - or wanted it to be happening, because some, you know, immigration agent would just change the spelling of their name. But this was a time when people were not necessarily proud of their past and their background, but very much wanted to kind of become Americanized. But when I asked my, father and my grandfather, well, what was the name before it was Marshall, they said they didn't know. And I found that very strange in a way. I said, you mean you never asked your father

Unraveling Family Secrets: A Quest for Origins

00:04:47 - And they said, well, he had been in an orphanage when he was young, and he didn't like to talk about the past and know they had never asked. So periodically I would begin, to, to look. this was even before kind of ancestry.com and family history and genealogy became really popular, and I always hit dead ends. I never could, could find it, but then I would go back and look again.

00:05:19 - I think I became particularly, invested in this quest for some reason. But I also became very interested, perhaps in my own kind of acts of mourning in thinking about what it meant for my grandfather to have lost his father when he was, you know, 10 or 11 and be sent to an orphanage. so that's really what kind of led me.

00:05:50 - It was personally interesting to me, but it also became a kind of obsession in a way that I was compelled To pursue. I mean, often in my scholarship, I sometimes get involved in these detective stories of trying to understand what author, read another author and, you know, to uncover some of the historical context of, of something. But in this case, I think I did get very kind of intrigued by, these questions and,

Uncovering Repressed Family Histories

00:06:21 - detective work in trying to uncover them. But I do think that, you know, it, you know, the book is called Forgetting Fathers, and I did become very interested in the loss of fathers in remembering fathers. And then more and more kind of intrigued in the question of why this family history was actually repressed, not just forgotten, but, repressed in in some ways that this was a past

00:06:52 - I did a fair amount of, of archival work when I could. I live in California. A lot of these records were, in New York and the New York Public Library, but also in the, center for, for Jewish history. And my grandfather and his brothers had been in a very well-known orphanage called the Hebrew Orphan Asylum of New York. And I discovered that all of their archives were in the center for,

00:07:24 - So when I could, I did travel there, and eventually I did uncover some important, documents. But I started this in the years after, the kind of Google Books project began to digitize a lot of material. And, there's kind of an interesting history in that project too, because when they began that and they began to partner with a lot of, university libraries and, and public libraries, they had to have books

Digitization and Historical Research in Social Reform

00:07:56 - but also of a certain size and shape because of the scanning machines that they had at that time. And it turns out that a lot of the books that were digitized from university libraries and New York Public Librarian and other places around the country were, kind of public documents. And in the early years of, the, the 20th century, around the turn of, of,

00:08:25 - there was a huge social reform movement, particularly in New York, but elsewhere, where the state really tried to regulate, sweatshops, factories, orphan asylums, sanitariums. and part of that was an almost kind of French bureaucratic effort to document and inventory everything. And I discovered that there were all of these reports, annual reports, the report of the factory inspector

00:08:58 - what were called, lunacy, a Asylums. and all of those books had been digitized because they just happened to be convenient. So since I couldn't, because of my work, my, as a professor and an administrator, I didn't have time to just spend a year or two traveling around looking at archives. I would often late at night find these, reports. and then of course, ancestry

Unearthing Personal Histories through Digital Archives

00:09:33 - archives of the, latter Day Saints, and newspapers more and more became, became digitized as well. So a combination of old fashioned archival work, but also a huge amount of material just then beginning to show up on the internet. But it took a lot of detective work also because you couldn't, it wasn't obvious how to find these things or even what the search terms would be,

00:10:02 - You often had to kind of look through thousands of pages of A PDF and try to figure out where something might be. I became very interested in how the personal was inscribed in the public and in the historical. So, you know, I've done research on what we would now describe as famous authors, you know, George Elliot or Adam Smith, or, you know, others like that. And so there are papers, there are archives,

00:10:34 - who were ordinary people. They were, they have no archives per se. They were not historical figures. So I became very interested in how much one could find, and some of the reports and documents that I was mentioning, you know, as well as birth certificates, marriage certificates, death certificates and things like that, how much the, you could find the, the, these personal stories inscribed in the public record. And every record I found, like a birth certificate

Uncovering Personal Histories through Public Records

00:11:09 - that one could read almost like a literary text, not in the sense of, you know, trying to make up interpretations, but I became very interested in every name that was there, the name of a witness on a marriage certificate, the name of the doctor on the death certificate of my great-grandfather. And, that turned out to be a key, which opened up multiple other stories.

00:11:41 - then got involved with was trying to understand what historical context was needed to understand the personal story. So I did a lot of research on the Taylor Strike of 1894 on the Lower East Side in New York, and, you know, labor history, history of psychiatry. so those personal stories then opened up into larger social, stories that I needed to unpack in order

00:12:14 - of my great-grandfather and his family would've been. You're dealing with, public records that are scattered about, you have to find clues. And then one of the challenges in particular with immigrants is that not only did people change their names, but there was no standardized spelling, no standardized trans transliteration. so part of the challenge of my trying

Navigating Immigrant Identity and Documentation Challenges

00:12:42 - that it was spelled about 12 different ways, even under the best of of circumstances, and often misspelled with the wrong first, initial. I had to develop sort of ways of searching for those things as well. so it was a particular, kind of unstable category when you're, you know, when you're looking at that experience of immigrant at that time, when again, the state is just beginning to try

00:13:15 - in the 18th century, it was a lot easier for people to change their names and make up new identities and reinvent themselves. but at, but, but here, so I became interested in, you know, when were the first driver's licenses instituted in New York? Well, it was actually right around this time, and you know, today we have photocopy machines, not to mention, you know, scanning and, and documents. And at that time, you know, people didn't have a copy

00:13:43 - They didn't have a copy of, of, of any of those documents. So you, it was just a, a, a moment when the state, was really trying to, to sort of keep track of things. Whereas today, of course, you know, everything is, is, is documented with identity checks and social security numbers and passwords and all of that. My grandfather, was, from

Unraveling Family Shadows: The Orphanage and Hidden Histories

00:14:18 - And, well, he had, right, there were three boys and, and two girls. And the youngest was born after his father died. And, his mother couldn't take care of the children when the father died. So they were sent to this Hebrew orphan asylum. and in fact, at that orphan asylum, about 70% of the children there had a living parent,

00:14:47 - and they couldn't, the, the families couldn't, take, take care of them. But I also then uncovered that it wasn't simply that the father died and they were destitute, but it appeared that the father died in a sanitarium for nervous disorders. and that's where my kind of research on, you know, what was called lunacy, you know, began and I began to reconstruct a kind of tumultuous past

00:15:20 - and, to imagine that there had been a, a very difficult family history where, the, the history of the father was perhaps scandalous, disgraceful, but, or at least traumatic enough, that no one really wanted to, to remember it had been working on this, project on and off, you know, for some years, just as a kind of occasional hobby.

Exploring Loss: A Journey Through Family and Memory

00:15:51 - I did find myself drawn towards it more. And I mean, I think that probably when I really discovered I was writing a book, because at some point I was doing the research and I just started writing. And the book begins by picturing the scene of my grandfather, in the orphanage receiving a Bible, which I inherited that has that name on it, and trying to reconstruct that scene,

00:16:25 - And so when I really realized I was writing a book and then started doing it in earnest and really trying to, to work on it, as much as I could, I began to realize that it also was a kind of act of mourning. And then in some ways, the book was about lost fathers and forgotten fathers, forgetting fathers, remembering fathers. so I began to realize, I suppose one could say perhaps it's an over simplification,

00:16:59 - But I do think, but it was something that I became interested in as I was writing how the book itself was an act of, of mourning, and it begins in the orphanage, at what today we, we would call a bar mitzvah, where, where my grandfather is presented, a bible that has his name on it. And that itself was a kind of mystery, and the book ends in a cemetery where I was trying

Exploring Memory and Identity Through Literary Nonfiction

00:17:29 - and, so it, really all of that, you know, kind of, experience of death and, and mourning is inscribed in the, the writing of the book itself. I do hope that the story itself is interesting and, I, When I published the book, I was invited by various genealogical societies to talk. And so I do think that people are interested in that type

00:18:01 - but I also, took seriously the notion that this is a work of literary nonfiction that is, excuse me, inscribed in the history of the novel. I've also been invited at times to speak on panels about writing about the self, the history of memoir, the history of, of autobiography. So I'm hoping that the book is compelling itself,

00:18:34 - of detective story that dramatizes the search. I don't simply tell it in a linear narrative and begin by saying, here's everything I found out, and now I'm gonna reconstruct the, the history of, of these characters, but rather, I sort of try to talk about what it means to have this kind of quest and how one reconstructs from these kind of documents. And I tried to be very scrupulous about where I was

Exploring Family Through Historical Research

00:19:08 - and where I was simply reporting, the record. This is not a work of historical fiction. so I really tried to, there is speculation in it that I kind of label as such, or I'm trying to imagine the character, so to speak, of my, my, my family. but I, am always interested in that, that process of, that, that act of historical research,

00:19:35 -

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