9789657041178_

Playing Detective with Family Lore is more than one familys saga. The far-ranging origins of the authors family and the course of the progenitors lives and those of their descendants provide a microcosmic illustration of the macro-level triumphs and tragedies of Jewish life in Eastern Europe and America. From the tiny Radekhiv shtetl to the famous Polish market town Jaroslaw, from the Russian port city Nikolayev - inside of the Pale of Settlement during the 1905 pogroms, to Jassy - rife with unique antisemitic legislation following Romanian independence, this book unwittingly traces a collective history epitomized by one particular familys combined narratives, making it a must read for the 80 of American Jews who trace their ancestry back to Eastern Europe.

Playing Detective with Family Lore goes beyond Researching Your Family History Online for Dummies. Offering more than a ringside seat how to mine information online, the author, a seasoned journalist, shares her expertise with budding memoirists. She explores how the skills and the logic of a Sherlock Holmes can be employed to stitch together snippets of information in order to forge a more coherent whole that may confirm, contest, augment, or complicate oral family lore.

Not your run-of-the-mill memoir, the structure is a tad unique. Sprinkled at the bottom of the pages, academic footnotes are repurposed to create a new genre: Experiential Reading. The links to historical footage, photos, and short texts make reading this work closer to a virtual museum than a traditional e-book.

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Playing Detective with Family Lore

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