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Summary
Summary
A New York Times correspondent recounts his family's experiences before and after World War II, including his grandfather's work as a Zionist in Palestine, his family's relocation to America, and his parents' secret marriage.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
This memoir tells ?a story of a town and a time and a boy who grew up there.? The town is the New York suburb of Bayonne, N.J.; the time is the 1940s and ?50s; and the boy is Roberts, syndicated columnist and coauthor (with his wife, Cokie Roberts) of From This Day Forward. Growing up, Roberts?s Old World ties were strong. His Jewish family had their roots in Eastern Europe, and he proudly relates the story of how they came to America (his maternal grandfather, Abraham Rogowsky, is particularly fascinating: born in Bialystok, he stole money to become a Zionist pioneer in Palestine in 1907). Roberts also recounts how his parents met in the mid-?30s in New Jersey??two shy and sensitive souls, sophisticated about books and innocent about life??but the book doesn?t really hit its stride until the author begins describing his own experiences. He paints a reflective portrait of his childhood and young adulthood, when he played and fought with his twin brother, Marc, and when he attended Harvard University, where he met Cokie Boggs, his future wife. ?All families have their own folklore, stories they tell and axioms they use,? Roberts writes. Thankfully, the stories told here have widespread appeal. As the author?s family name changes from Rogowsky to Rogow to Roberts, a universal story of the American experience of immigrant conversion emerges from all the carefully limned details. Photos. (May) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
Booklist Review
Roberts' first newspaper job was at the Times--the Bayonne Times--and the well-known journalist recalls his childhood and adolescence in that often-disparaged New Jersey city. Thematically, his memoir traces acculturation, beginning with that of his immigrant grandparents, and extending to his own education about the world beyond Bayonne. The majority of this memoir focuses on two people: Roberts' father, Will, and Will's father, Abe, an opinionated eccentric whose businesses hovered between the legal and the illegal. The author expresses loyal and warm feelings about his father, without sentimentalizing his struggles to make it. A cache of his parents' premarital letters allows Roberts to reconstruct their youthful ambitions and anxieties, and their traditional relationship sets the stage for the 1950s adventures of Roberts and his twin, who was afflicted with polio. Set against Bayonne's population, made up of Eastern European Catholics and Jews, Roberts' affecting recollections of sports, girls, and family seldom omit an ethnic component, and fairly burst with his feelings about his family's lore. A singular saga of assimilation. --Gilbert Taylor Copyright 2005 Booklist
Library Journal Review
Taking the boy out of Bayonne may be possible, but taking Bayonne out of the boy is not-at least, according to this warm and welcoming memoir by journalist Roberts, who hails from the New Jersey city. In Bayonne, surrounded by his Eastern European Jewish relatives-his parents, twin brother, and two younger siblings-Roberts grew up in a two-story, two-family house built by his maternal grandfather, Harry Schambam. His paternal grandfather, Abraham Rogowsky (later Rogow, then Roberts), a Zionist, helped construct the road to Tel Aviv, while his colorful father, Will, a book publisher, children's author, and businessman, gambled and dabbled in left-wing politics. Always proud of his heritage, Roberts grew up with a good mix of family, baseball games at Yankee Stadium, and stints at school newspapers. His work for the Harvard Crimson led to a position at the New York Times, which eventually led to his post as Los Angeles bureau chief. Roberts, married to the equally well-known Cokie Roberts, now has a distinguished career as a syndicated columnist, newsman, radio commentator, and writer. And as he makes clear in this memoir, his Bayonne beginnings greatly informed the man he is today. Recommended for public libraries.-Robert Kelly, Fort Wayne Community Schs., IN (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
My Fathers' Houses Memoir of a Family Chapter One A Bottle in A Bucket I still dream about Bayonne. Usually I'm back living there, often in the house where I grew up, a two-family frame structure on a crowded block that ends at a low bluff overlooking Newark Bay. All the houses on The Block were the same, about twenty-five of them, separated by alleys so narrow that you always knew what your neighbors were arguing about or having for dinner. The Block was the center of my world for thirteen years, from my birth in 1943 until we moved all of five blocks away in 1956, and it could have been a European village, on the top of a mountain, surrounded by medieval stone walls. All the families knew each other, strangers were sparse, and you could walk to the shops around the corner for most of your daily needs. That's no accident, I suppose, since most of the families, including mine, were only one generation removed from their Old World origins, and they re-created the patterns of life they had known in Poland and Russia, Ireland and Italy. There were a handful of Catholics on The Block, but most of the families were like us, Jewish people with roots in Eastern Europe -- Lipkin and Lauton, Moritz and Hoch, Reznick and Levy. Some were manual workers, like my grandfather Harry Schanbam, a carpenter who had built the house we lived in with his own hands. Some in the next generation had gotten an education and become professionals. Yale Greenspoon's father taught at the high school, Artie Schackman's dad was a photographer. Many owned small businesses. The Penners ran a clothing store on Broadway where we bought our Cub Scout uniforms. The parents and grandparents of the girl I took to the junior prom ran a hardware store. New York was only a short bus ride away, but "the city," as we called it, seldom intruded into our lives. Broadway and Forty-second Street in Bayonne (there really is such an intersection) was light years away from the more famous corner just across the Hudson River. My father commuted daily to "the city," where he ran a small children's book publishing company, but few if any of my friends had parents who did that. Most people lived and worked, met and married, grew old and died, all within the confines of this urban village. Bayonne was not exactly Anatevka, and we didn't have any fiddlers on our roofs, although we did have Mr. Friedberg, who delivered seltzer to the door in blue glass bottles with silver spritzers. But when I saw the movie Avalon, Barry Levinson's ode to the Jewish community of Baltimore, I felt a pang of recognition. In that movie the immigrant generation clings to the old neighborhood and the old ways, and when their kids move to the suburbs, the old folks find the adjustment disorienting. Bayonne, like Baltimore, was actually closer to the Old Country than the suburbs were to the inner city. Bayonne is a peninsula, about five square miles, surrounded on three sides by water: Newark Bay to the west, the Kill Van Kull on the south, and the Hudson River on the east. In fact, after we left The Block, I could catch a glimpse of the Statue of Liberty from my new bedroom window. But I've never been there and I'm not sure why. I guess you don't play tourist in your hometown. During my childhood, you could enter and leave Bayonne in only two ways-by city street to Jersey City and by bridge to Staten Island-so the word "insular" really did apply. I flew over it recently, heading for Manhattan, and I was struck again by how distinctive Bayonne is. You can pick it out immediately from the air. And since it was such a separate and self-contained place, it had a strong sense of identity. One public high school, one daily newspaper, one downtown shopping district. To this day I meet people all over the country who want to tell me about their connections to Bayonne. My friend Barney Frank, now a congressman from Massachusetts, who grew up there, says people always talk about being from Bayonne because they are "so proud of rising above their humble beginnings." But I don't think that's quite right. I think it's because Bayonne is a real place, with a long history, dating back to its discovery by Dutch explorers in the seventeenth century. It's not a fake city, bordered by arbitrary lines on a suburban map and bearing some insipid variation of the name Parkforestglenwood. It's also true that Bayonne has become something of a joke, like Secaucus, employed as a punch line by comedians and cartoonists. One of my favorite references is a New Yorker cartoon showing a man sitting at a bar and saying to no one in particular: "I'm a citizen of the world, but I make my base in Bayonne." Jackie Gleason once did stand-up comedy at the Hi-Hat Club in Bayonne, and his TV show The Honeymooners was loaded with local references. If he frequently threatened to send his wife, Alice, "to the moon," he often vowed to dispatch his pal Norton to Bayonne. My brother Marc remembers Gleason portraying a pitchman in a TV comedy skit. If you call in right away, he promises, and order the food chopper or vacuum cleaner he's selling, he'll throw in a free pennant from Bayonne Technical High School. Who could refuse that offer? The New York Times obituary of the comic Rodney Dangerfield noted that he got his start playing "dingy joints" in places like Bayonne. As Dangerfield himself might have said, my hometown "gets no respect." A Navy ship was once named for the city, the USS Bayonne, but in the middle of World War II it was actually given to the Russians, who then scrapped it ... My Fathers' Houses Memoir of a Family . Copyright © by Steven Roberts. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from My Fathers' Houses: Memoir of a Family by Steven V. Roberts All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.