Lost in America: A Journey with My Father
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Sherwin Nuland's powerful story traces the crumbling of his father's American Dream. As the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth, 19-year-old Meyer Nudelman emigrated to America from Russia and found, instead of expanding opportunities, a constricted life of sweatshop jobs, an overcrowded Bronx apartment shared with his mother-in-law and sister-in-law, illness, and the premature deaths of his wife and first son. Despairing and bitter, Nudelman saw his own health deteriorate to the point where even the simplest of tasks, like walking and eating, became a foray into the unpredictable. In this memoir, Nuland struggles with his father's legacy, acknowledging that the weight of so much illness inspired his own career in medicine, as the costs of his father's losses were transformed into the wealth of his personal development. 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
