Lost in America: A Journey with My Father

He walks with me through every day of my life, in that unsteady, faltering gait that so embarrassed me when I was a boy. Always, he is holding fast to the upper part of my right arm . . . As we make our way together, my father-I called him Daddy when I was small, because it sounded American and that is how he so desperately wanted things to seem-is speaking in the idiosyncratic rhythms of a self-constructed English.

So Sherwin Nuland introduces Meyer Nudelman, his father, a man whose presenc...