An eloquent personal reflection on the fascination of family history and the desire to both discover and escape origins.
In Forgetting Fathers, David Marshall weaves together the stories of his grandfather and great-grandfather with his own quest to solve the mystery of his family’s past. Beginning as a search for his lost family name, Marshall attempts to understand the origins of his grandfather, who spent part of his childhood in the Hebrew Orphan Asylum of the City of New York. He also reconstructs the life and death of his great-grandfather, a Russian immigrant tailor who died at age thirty-six in a private sanitarium dedicated to the treatment of mental and nervous diseases. The narrative becomes a detective story that reflects on our ambivalence about origins, the relation between history and mourning, and the compulsion to search for life stories. Forgetting Fathers combines historical accounts based on records, reports, and public documents with autobiographical reflections and speculations. Included throughout are photographs, newspaper clippings, and facsimiles of original documents that provide a sense of both the texture of the times and the fabric of archival and genealogical research.
Table des matières
Note to the Reader
Preface
1. Presented to David Marshall
2. Finding Names
3. Inscribing Names
4. A Posthumous Child
5. Traces of the Father
6. Traces of the Tailor: Becoming a Contractor
7. Traces of the Tailor: On Strike
8. Special Circumstances of the Case
9. Reading the Death Certificate
10. Reading the Death Certificate: The Place of Death
11. Reading the Death Certificate: The Name of the Physician
12. Reading the Death Certificate: The Name of the Disease
13. The Case of H.W.
14. The Pavilion for the Insane
15. The Place of Burial: Machpelah
16. Saying Kaddish for a Ghost
17. Picturing a Future
18. Picturing a Past
19. A Ghost and a Memory
20. Searches and Signs
21. Returning to Machpelah
Notes
A propos de l’auteur
David Marshall is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has published widely on the history of the novel, aesthetics, and autobiography.
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