The most moving sections are those having to do with his relatives who were killed in the Holocaust. But before we learn about her great successes as a capitalist, he fills in details about her early life in Eastern Europe, sketching in the political climate, the growing restrictions on Jews, and her risky, active membership in the Bund. For example, he gives us many interesting details about the oldest sibling, his great aunt Itel Rosenthal, who founded and ran the Maidenform Bra company along with her husband. In the metropolitan New York area, where the bulk of Laskin's family originally settled, we read about the businesses they established and how they lived out versions of the American Dream. What’s truly satisfying about reading The Family is being able to follow Laskin’s highly readable prose where he integrates history from many sources and places his relatives in the context of history. In the course of the book, Laskin follows their descendents along three geographical paths: Eastern Europe, America, and Israel.Įven though Laskin grew up in the New York City suburbs near his immigrant grandfather and some of his grandfather’s siblings, he knew nothing about their early lives, neither in Eastern Europe nor in America where they immigrated over the course of the first decade of the 20th century. When he got old enough to make decisions for himself, he distanced himself from his Jewish heritage and the world represented by his immigrant relatives. A call to Israel at the suggestion of his mother to ask a cousin to verify the accuracy of a family "legend" piqued his interest in his family’s history and started him on a quest to learn everything he could. The unspeakable tragedies and improbable triumphs of the European Jewish diaspora in the 20th century have been told many times but rarely quite so compellingly as in David Laskin's "The Family." from a review by Edward Kosner in the Wall Street Journal ĭavid Laskin (b.1953) has woven together a tapestry of engrossing stories about his large extended family, starting with his great-great grandfather Shimon Dov HaKohen, a torah scribe, and his wife Beyle Shapiro who lived and raised their six children in Volozhin in Belarus.
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