An Echo in My Blood: The Search for My Family's Hidden Past | Alan Weisman

An Echo in My Blood: The Search for My Family's Hidden Past | Alan Weisman | An amazing, page-turning story about real ideas

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An Echo in My Bloo...

	An Echo in My Blood: The Search for My Family's Hidden Past Alan Weisman Harcourt, 1999 - 426 pages average customer review:based on 7 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Throughout his childhood in Minneapolis, Alan Weisman was told that his grandfather was killed by Communists in the Ukraine at the turn of the century. When, as an adult, he meets a long-estranged uncle who tells a very different version of the story, Alan embarks on a search for the truth that takes him to the chemical ruin of Chernobyl and back in time to the Bolshevik Revolution. He discovers the paradoxical rationale for his father's vehement political and social conservatism as well as a more universal truth: that all immigrant families, in order to survive in a new world, must create protective family myths. One of these myths hides the true fate of his grandfather-a nightmare too terrible to express. At once an examination of his rootless generation and a look at the hopes and dreams of his forefathers, An Echo in My Blood takes you from the secret heart of an America you might not recognize to the pogroms of turn-of-the-century Kiev.

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An Echo in My Blood

I am a descendent of the family that Mr Weisman writes about. How ironic, that I discovered this book through a distant relative who knew I was looking for information on my great grandparents, on my mother's side. I am named for Bess Goldman, a relative of Mr. Weisman. I asked hundreds of questions about my family while my grandparents were alive, and most were stonewalled. After resigning myself to never knowing the truth, I read this book, and many mysteries are finally solved. I am now 56 and for most of my life the story of my family was concealed from me, I never knew why. In those days, living in denial saved you from the truth. I must be a distant cousin to Mr. Weisman, I had many relatives my grandparents would never tell me about, I never knew why they fled the Ukraine. this book has provided answers to lingering questions, echos, so to speak. I will be sending each my two children this book and will share it with remaining family members. Mr. Weisman's research is inspiring. I admire his tenacity in delving into the past with such enthusiasm. This book could be anybody's family, it is a microcosm of our journey from elsewhere to America. Pamela Price Lechtman

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An amazing, page-turning story about real ideas

This book goes far beyond conventional memoir. The author's story shows how our world today is tangled with the past, and that we drag the past along with us, whether we know it or not. Through vivid personal stories, the writer shows how events as disparate as the Jewish pogroms in Russia, the McCarthy blacklist, and the current environmental crisis are all connected. He reminds us that we all share the inherited pain of immigration. A beautifully written, sad and funny, important book.

Our shared catastrophe and revelation

How deeply moved my wife and I have been by this momentous, beautiful book, which both of us have found to be truly unforgettable. Echo in the blood, indeed. Weisman has found a way to widen a story that is essentially "personal" and familial by ramifying that story in multiple dimensions -- geo-politically, ecologically, historically and racially (the euphemism is "culturally," but this is a book that is unabashedly concerned with the complex meanings of racial inheritance). Most staggering to me are the book's accounts of visiting the weirdly transformed Ukrainian landscape around Chernobyl, the passages that combine the author's father's letters from combat in World-War-Two-era Europe with descriptions of the ongoing lives of relatives at home in Minnesota, and the chapters detailing (with intricate, agonizing subtlety) the deaths of his parents, one then the other. My wife's strongest response was a whole-body recognition of a certain truth, in which the book immerses its reader: As a people, as a species, we are making war on each other and on the living earth. Every one of us carries the burden and the damage of that war into our future. This is extraordinary writing, extraordinarily difficult to make sing, and Alan Weisman has brought it to song.

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Fascinating account (despite the leftist agenda)

Weisman is a good writer, with an amazing true story to tell. A journalist traveling to the Ukraine to investigate the Chernobyl disaster (an amazing story in its own right), he decides to visit his ancestral town of Elizavetgrad (Yelisavethgrad). This takes him on an unexpected odyssey of self-discovery and family history.

His insights into Jewish life (in Chicago and Russia) are especially engaging. Some readers will tire of his sometimes relentless left-wing agenda, but I was glad I didn't let that distract from the really fine cultural portrait he has composed.

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Serious items of 20th Cent

I surpsed myself and finished this
book as I was going to stop on several
ocassions. His vinettes of imprtant
history(the Russian civil war,the Chicago
convention,the Unamerican Committee) were
incredible. I take issue with the extent
of his family history which was confusing
and tiring.

reviews: page 1, 2

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