Michael Frank’s “One Hundred Saturdays” is a memorable portrait of a resilient woman reflecting on nine decades of life and a moving evocation of the prewar Sephardic community on the island of Rhodes.
Emma Wolf, mother of American Jewish fiction, gets a new reprint 120 years later jweekly.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from jweekly.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Books coverage is supported by a generous grant from The Milton and Sophie Meyer Fund.
What makes books on family history so compelling for me is that they offer a fresh and personal lens on historical events while simultaneously illustrating how historical circumstances have a profound impact on the development of people and their descendants.
Raised in Santiago, Berkeley and Mexico City,
Claudio Lomnitz is a professor of anthropology at Columbia University.
Lomnitz’s quest to understand his ancestors’ lives was made more difficult by the need to unravel the complicated national claims on their places of origin. As he notes, “I had to study a great deal just to answer one apparently simple question: Where were they from?”