From the destruction of Jewish life in Eastern Europe to the establishment of the state of Israel and the extraordinary prosperity and influence of American Jews, the past century has been one of the most eventful, for both good and ill, in the history of the Jewish people. In The Family, journalist and popular historian David Laskin deftly employs the story of his own maternal ancestors as a proxy for the millions who experienced those momentous events, in the process offering some hints at the reasons for Jewish survival.
The most gripping portion of Laskin's book is his excruciating account of the extermination in early 1940s of the family line in Europe, the majority victims of Nazi Aktions against the Jews preceding the establishment of the death camps. Yet, even as his European relatives were being wiped out, two family businesses--a housewares company and his great-aunt Itel's Maiden Form (later Maidenform) Bra Company--flourished. The story of the family's Israel branch, established in 1924 by Chaim Kaganovich, reveals the harsh life that greeted Jewish pioneers in Palestine and illuminates some of the early struggles between Jews and Arabs that have become only more bitter and intractable today.
Many in the family, including Laskin, have abandoned religious practice while at least clinging to some form of Jewish cultural identity. Though Laskin doesn't confront it, the question of whether that identity will be enough to sustain the Jewish people for another century lingers over this work.
Despite that omission, The Family succeeds in transforming the intensely personal account of how "[h]istory made and broke my family in the twentieth century" into a powerful rendition of the tragic and triumphant history of the Jewish people. --Harvey Freedenberg, attorney and freelance reviewer