davidfcooper

What happens when a New York Jewish pack-rat daughter inherits her New York Jewish pack-rat father's belongings? She embarks on a Jewish genealogical search for her and her dad's long lost relatives. Nancy K. Miller's What They Saved: Pieces of a Jewish Past, published today by University of Nebraska Press, is the story of that search, a story that focuses more on the process of the search than on its results. In my New York Journal of Books review I quote Ms. Miller, “Every new piece of information keeps me on the road to the ever-expanding possibility of the quest, a quest that in the end will still yield only partial knowledge—and will never give me, return to me, those past lives.” Ms. Miller, a retired CUNY Graduate Center English and Comparative Literature professor, is an appealing prose stylist, but because of its focus on the genalogical search process this book will mostly appeal to genealogy buffs in general and Jewish genealogy buffs in particular.

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This article first appeared on the late Examiner.com