A Legacy : Echoes of Loss and Healing in a Jewish-American Family

How Our Family Secrets Live Within Us... Sometimes I think I married my grandfather. With these intriguing words Gittel begins her memoir about colorful characters like the author's adventurous grandfather, who practiced medicine all over the country, from the bayous of Louisiana to the silver mines of Colorado to the brownstones of New York. He was once the only doctor, only pharmacist, and only Jewish man in tiny Venango, Nebraska. We meet her mysterious great-grandfather, who disappeared from his family and just as mysteriously reappeared. And we witness the struggles of their descendants, some of whom are plagued by the family genetic disease. In A Legacy echoes of past generations reverberate in the essential relationships of father and son, mother and daughter, parent and child. Gittel traces the heartbreaks and eventual healing in six generations of her family. And she describes how divorce scars everyone in the family. It is the universal story about how our yearnings and failings are passed down through the generations and become our nemesis. Our family secrets live within us, and we sometimes unconsciously replay our history. The sins of the fathers are visited upon the sons.