 This
book will not tell you how to do genealogical research. Instead, it
will tell you how genealogical research affected the lives of the
researchers and the people they discovered. Every Family Has a Story: Tales
from the Pages of
AVOTAYNU consists of 72 articles that have appeared in
our journal, AVOTAYNU, each story focusing on the human side
of
genealogy—how
genealogists have been personally affected by their research and how
the research of genealogists has affected others.
The book
is
divided into eight sections. The first section, titled
“Potpourri” contains a mixture of articles chosen
as the best of the best human interest articles selected for the book.
“Freya Joins the Kahn Klan” relates how a woman,
who was adopted shortly after birth, decided to locate her birth family
when, in her
mid-40s, she became
interested in genealogy. She discovered
she was one of eight children—the only one adopted out. None
of her birth siblings knew of her existence. How she found the family
and the consequences would make a Hollywood movie.
“Evelyne
Regains Her Identity” relates how a genealogist helped a
child survivor of the Holocaust find family and return to Judaism.
Another article, by Batya
Unterschatz, “The Diary of Miriam Hanania,”
describes how she helped locate a woman who wrote a diary
as a teenager. The story has a shocking ending. The most unusual
name-change story ever published in AVOTAYNU is described in
“A Priest in the Family.”
Valery
Bazarov of HIAS
and Marian Smith of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services
relate a very unusual immigrant story in “Children Under 16
Unaccompanied by Parent: The Family Zuser.” When a Jewish
mother with four children got off the boat at Ellis Island, the
authorities were suspicious that two of them were not
hers—they were black. Finally, the Potpourri section ends
with the real story of how the legend the hapless Jewish immigrant
whose name was changed at Ellis Island to Sean Ferguson..
The
remaining stories are divided into sections:
People
Family
Back to
the Old Country
Crypto-Jews
Luck
Genealogy
Holocaust
One
of the
best stories is the last in the book. Written by Olga Zabludoff and
titled “When Good Men Do Nothing,” it relates how
the
author and other Jewish genealogists, with the help of local citizens,
restored the Jewish cemetery and mass graves in Butrimonys, Lithuania.
(On September 9, 1941, 1,230 Jewish men, women and children, were shot
to death by German SS soldiers and their bodies dumped into two mass
graves.) In our correspondence with Olga, we apologized for making her
story the
last one, but she responded that it was of no concern to her. She
stated that with the name Zabludoff, she was used to being in last
place.
7" x 10" 304 pp. hardcover $37.00
Complete
Table of Contents
(PDF file)
Sample
story - The Diary of Miriam Hanania (PDF file)
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