An Orphan in History: Retrieving a Jewish Legacy

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Doubleday, 1982 - 246 Seiten
You are about to embark on a wondrous voyage through time and culture. The journey carries you from the privileged world of Park Avenue to nineteenth-century Lithuania, turn-of-the-century Chicago, a contemporary Israeli kibbutz, and the timeless world of New York City's Lower East Side. Journey's end occurs in the Jewish year 5743 on Manhattan's Upper West Side, just crosstown and a lifetime away from where Paul Cowan's complicated, halting trip toward faith begins. Paul Cowan grows up unaware that he is a descendant of rabbis. In one generation five thousand years of religion and culture have been lost. Like millions of immigrant families, Lou and Polly Cowan pay for the prosperity with their pasts. When they die in a tragic fire, Paul begins a search for that part of his parents that had perished in America. The quest for an ancestral legacy by the American, Paul Cowan, becomes a rite of passage for the Jew who emerges Saul Cohen. Relatives like Jacob Cohen, the used cement bag dealer, and Modie Spiegel, Sr., the mail order magnate, come to life in the author's warm and touching recreation of an odyssey through immigrant America. - Jacket flap.

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Autoren-Profil (1982)

Paul Cowan was born in New York City on September 21, 1940. His Jewish ancestry had been largely kept from him by his parents, who were eager to assimilate into the society around them. As a child, he celebrated Christmas and was educated at Choate, an Episcopal school. He graduated from Harvard University in 1963 and married Rachel Cowan in 1965. Together they registered black voters in Mississippi and served in the Peace Corps in Ecuador. They began exploring Judaism in their mid-30s. He wrote several books during his lifetime including The Making of an Un-American, An Orphan in History, and Mixed Blessings: Overcoming the Stumbling Blocks in an Interfaith Marriage written with his wife. He was a staff writer for The Village Voice for more than 20 years. A collection of his articles for The Voice were collected in a book titled The Tribes of America. He died of complications from leukemia on September 26, 1988 at the age of 48.

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