My Fathers Houses: Memoir of a Family
Contents:
As the author's family name changes from Rogowsky to Rogow to Roberts, a universal story of the American experience of immigrant conversion emerges from all the carefully limned details. Roberts' first newspaper job was at the Times-- the Bayonne Times-- and the well-known journalist recalls his childhood and adolescence in that often-disparaged New Jersey city.
Thematically, his memoir traces acculturation, beginning with that of his immigrant grandparents, and extending to his own education about the world beyond Bayonne. The majority of this memoir focuses on two people: Roberts' father, Will, and Will's father, Abe, an opinionated eccentric whose businesses hovered between the legal and the illegal. The author expresses loyal and warm feelings about his father, without sentimentalizing his struggles to make it. A cache of his parents' premarital letters allows Roberts to reconstruct their youthful ambitions and anxieties, and their traditional relationship sets the stage for the s adventures of Roberts and his twin, who was afflicted with polio.
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Set against Bayonne's population, made up of Eastern European Catholics and Jews, Roberts' affecting recollections of sports, girls, and family seldom omit an ethnic component, and fairly burst with his feelings about his family's lore. A singular saga of assimilation. Would you like to tell us about a lower price?
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A multi-generational self-portrait of a New York Times correspondent's family's experiences before and after World War II recounts such events as his grandfather's work as a Zionist in Palestine, his family's relocation to America, and his parents' secret marriage. Read more Read less. Prime Book Box for Kids.
My Fathers' Houses
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My Fathers' Houses: Memoir of a Family
The Ghost of My Father. Friedberg, who delivered seltzer to the door in blue glass bottles with silver spritzers. In that movie the immigrant generation clings to the old neighborhood and the old ways, and when their kids move to the suburbs, the old folks find the adjustment disorienting. Bayonne, like Baltimore, was actually closer to the Old Country than the suburbs were to the inner city. Bayonne is a peninsula, about five square miles, surrounded on three sides by water: In fact, after we left The Block, I could catch a glimpse of the Statue of Liberty from my new bedroom window.
But I've never been there and I'm not sure why. I guess you don't play tourist in your hometown. During my childhood, you could enter and leave Bayonne in only two ways-by city street to Jersey City and by bridge to Staten Island-so the word "insular" really did apply. I flew over it recently, heading for Manhattan, and I was struck again by how distinctive Bayonne is. You can pick it out immediately from the air. And since it was such a separate and self-contained place, it had a strong sense of identity.
One public high school, one daily newspaper, one downtown shopping district. To this day I meet people all over the country who want to tell me about their connections to Bayonne. My friend Barney Frank, now a congressman from Massachusetts, who grew up there, says people always talk about being from Bayonne because they are "so proud of rising above their humble beginnings. I think it's because Bayonne is a real place, with a long history, dating back to its discovery by Dutch explorers in the seventeenth century.
It's not a fake city, bordered by arbitrary lines on a suburban map and bearing some insipid variation of the name Parkforestglenwood.
It's also true that Bayonne has become something of a joke, like Secaucus, employed as a punch line by comedians and cartoonists. One of my favorite references is a New Yorker cartoon showing a man sitting at a bar and saying to no one in particular: If he frequently threatened to send his wife, Alice, "to the moon," he often vowed to dispatch his pal Norton to Bayonne. My brother Marc remembers Gleason portraying a pitchman in a TV comedy skit. If you call in right away, he promises, and order the food chopper or vacuum cleaner he's selling, he'll throw in a free pennant from Bayonne Technical High School.
Who could refuse that offer? The New York Times obituary of the comic Rodney Dangerfield noted that he got his start playing "dingy joints" in places like Bayonne. As Dangerfield himself might have said, my hometown "gets no respect. My Fathers' Houses Memoir of a Family. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from My Fathers' Houses: The place was one block in Bayonne, New Jersey, and the house that Roberts's grandfather, Harry Schanbam, built with his own hands, a warm and reassuring home, just across the Hudson River from "the city," where Roberts grew up surrounded by family and tales of the Old Country.
A great-uncle became an editor of Pravda and two great-aunts were original members of the Bolshevik party. His other grandfather, Abraham Rogowsky, stole money to become a Zionist pioneer in Palestine and helped to build the second road in Tel Aviv before settling in America. Roberts returns his saga to Depression-era Bayonne, where his parents, living one block apart, penned love letters to each other before marrying in secret. His father, an author and publisher of children's books, and his uncle, a critic and short story writer, instilled in him a love for words and a determination to carry on the family legacy, a legacy he is now passing on to his own children and grandchildren.
Contents Machine derived contents note: A Bottle In A Bucket 1 2. Old World Origins 21 3. Becoming Americans 42 4.
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