Lost in America: A Journey with My Father [NOOK Book]

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Overview

A writer renowned for his insight into the mysteries of the body now gives us a lambent and profoundly moving book about the mysteries of family. At its center lies Sherwin Nuland’s Rembrandtesque portrait of his father, Meyer Nudelman, a Jewish garment worker who came to America in the early years of the last century but remained an eternal outsider. Awkward in speech and movement, broken by the premature deaths of a wife and child, Meyer ruled his youngest son with a regime of rage, dependency, and helpless love that outlasted his death.

In evoking their relationship, Nuland also summons up the warmth and claustrophobia of a vanished immigrant New ...
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More About This Book

Overview

A writer renowned for his insight into the mysteries of the body now gives us a lambent and profoundly moving book about the mysteries of family. At its center lies Sherwin Nuland’s Rembrandtesque portrait of his father, Meyer Nudelman, a Jewish garment worker who came to America in the early years of the last century but remained an eternal outsider. Awkward in speech and movement, broken by the premature deaths of a wife and child, Meyer ruled his youngest son with a regime of rage, dependency, and helpless love that outlasted his death.

In evoking their relationship, Nuland also summons up the warmth and claustrophobia of a vanished immigrant New York, a world that impelled its children toward success yet made them feel like traitors for leaving it behind. Full of feeling and unwavering observation, Lost in America deserves a place alongside such classics as Patrimony and Call It Sleep.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

The New York Times
Hardly your evocative memoir, mellowed and illuminated by the years. The author's grievances are not retrospective; they are told as if still present. And that is the point. The book is defective as a memoir; it is something else in fact.

Dr. Nuland's iciness chills until we come to realize it is directed at himself. He had to reject his father's pain and humiliation, had to hold them at a distance; it was a vital need. And he is guilty and ashamed, which is not the same thing as apologetic because that would imply that things could have been different. Shame goes deeper; it is a tragic recognition of the inevitable. — Richard Eder

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From The Critics
The Yale professor of medicine Sherwin Nuland begins Lost in America: A Journey With My Father by evoking the depression that in his forties so debilitated him that only one doctor protested against his being lobotomized. This was, he thinks, the culmination of his unresolved relationship with his father, who "walks with me through every day of my life, in that unsteady, faltering gait that so embarrassed me when I was a boy." Meyer Nudelman cowed his family with his rage, but a mysterious, crippling illness also made him insecure and dependent. Only later, in medical school, did Nuland guess that his father had suffered from syphilis.

It is hard to imagine men with more to hide from their sons than those who participated in the Third Reich. Sigfrid Gauch's 1979 memoir of his Nazi father has been translated into English by William Radice, under the title Traces Of My Father. Gauch describes his "schizophrenic" situation, in which he had to learn "to love my father as a person but to be horrified by his personality."

Happy childhoods also have secrets, as Samuel Hynes'The Growing Seasons: An American Boyhood Before The War attests. What did Hynes' father mean when he took his sons driving, without their stepmother and stepsiblings, and asked if they would like to be "just us three" again? What did he mean by saying, on his deathbed, that he "gave up a lot"? The answers are as unrecoverable as Hynes' prewar innocence, which ended when he was called up to the Navy; boarding the train, he looked back at his father, who was already "moving rapidly away through spots of light and shadow toward the dark street." (Kate Taylor)

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780307426697
  • Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
  • Publication date: 12/18/2007
  • Sold by: Random House
  • Format: eBook
  • Pages: 224
  • Sales rank: 635,941
  • Series: Vintage
  • File size: 306 KB
  • Items ship to U.S, APO/FPO and U.S. Protectorate addresses.

Meet the Author

Sherwin B. Nuland, M.D., is the author of How We Die: Reflections on Life’s Final Chapter. He is clinical professor of surgery at Yale, where he also teaches bioethics and medical history. In addition to his numerous articles for medical publications, he has written for The New Yorker, The New Republic, the New York Times, Time, and the New York Review of Books. He writes a regular column for The American Scholar entitled “The Uncertain Art.” Dr. Nuland and his family live in Connecticut.


From the Trade Paperback edition.
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