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Turner Publishing Company - Paul Cowan

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135 pages

English

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Description

Sometimes we must look into the past in order to face the future.

After growing up as a fully assimilated Jew, Paul Cowan embarked in his mid-thirties upon a journey to discover and appreciate his true identity and heritage. This“orphan in history” relates his search for these roots, detailing the path he took from his Park Avenue home to nineteenth-century Lithuania to a contemporary Israeli kibbutz, leading to remarkable personal discoveries that will move everyone who has yearned to know more about their past.

An Orphan in History is a classically beautiful, inspiring story of how one man evolved from describing himself as “an American Jew” to “an American and a Jew.”

This story will inspire you to journey in search of your true self.

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Sujets

Philosophie et théologie

Judaism

Religion

Informations

Publié par	Turner Publishing Company
Date de parution	16 janvier 2012
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781580236089
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0848€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Dedication
I have a mystical belief that books echo back and forth through the generations. So this is dedicated to:
the memory of my parents, Pauline Spiegel Cowan and Louis G. Cowan;
to my uncle Modie J. Spiegel and the memory of my grandfather Jacob J. Cohen;
to my wife, Rachel Cowan;
to my children, Lisa Cowan and Matt Cowan;
to my teacher, Rabbi Joseph Singer.

Acknowledgments
I have interviewed hundreds of people for this book. Some are quoted by name; some wish to remain anonymous; most will recognize the nuggets of personal or historical insight they furnished.
In a few cases-those of my antagonists at Choate and some former girlfriends-I have disguised names. In some others, I have drawn from material I originally obtained for my book The Making of an Un-American or for my Voice articles.
I do want to acknowledge some people by name.
My brother Geoff and my sisters Holly and Liza have talked with me about this book since I began to write it-sometimes on a daily basis. At times, I ve felt that I ve interrupted their productive present lives with my obsessions about the past. And sometimes we have all been struck by the contrast between my personal past and our collective one, for these interpretations of the family and childhood we shared are mine and don t necessarily reflect their experiences or their points of view.
I want to thank my uncle John Spiegel, psychiatrist and social scientist, an unfailingly perceptive man whose insights have helped me enormously with this book.
Charles B. Bernstein, a Chicago-based lawyer and genealogist, has provided miracles of research which saved me years of work and helped me clear up scores of puzzles with quotes from crucial, almost unobtainable, documents.
My mother s friends Edna Lerner, Anne W. Simon, Leah Weisner, Judy Rosenwald, and Mimi Siffert have afforded invaluable insights, as have my father s friends Stan Kaplan, Joseph Lash, Milton Krentz, and Selma Hirsch. Of course, I take full responsibility for the portraits that emerge.
Some of my uncles, cousins, and aunts are mentioned by name, others are not. Originally, I guess, I sought to interview them largely in order to obtain information. But, for me, the enduring benefit of these contacts has been the increasingly deep sense of family-and the importance of family-they have afforded me.
My great-uncle Abraham Cohen, who was extremely helpful to me, died in May 1981. I wish that he could have lived to read this book.
Ken McCormick, Senior Consulting Editor of Doubleday, and Susan Schwartz, my editor, have taken an extraordinary amount of time to discuss this project with me, and to read what I wrote as soon as it was completed. Their opinions and encouragement helped me through some very difficult times.
My very good friends Rabbi Wolfe Kelman and Jacqueline Gutwirth both read a slightly earlier version of this manuscript, and made invaluable corrections and changes. My sister-in-law, Connie Egleson, has been an extremely helpful reader.
My agent, Amanda Urban, has given me frequent good advice and, more important, thrilled me at a moment of self-doubt by understanding this book in the exact context I meant it to be read.
I know it is unusual to dedicate a book to one s spouse, and then to acknowledge her. But my wife, Rachel, reads and rereads everything I write; she is the editor and friend I trust most. She is midwife to almost all my ideas and words.
Of course, in the end, much of a book like this must be largely speculative, and the guesswork is mine. Since many of the figures are dead, I can only hope I have interpreted their actions fairly and accurately.

Foreword
An Orphan in History is my story as an American Jew. I have spent years retrieving the religious and cultural legacy which had evaporated, in my family, under the pressure of assimilation. But, with only slight variations in personal and cultural details, it could be the story of Frankie Ruggio, whose grandfather spoke Italian and was named Dante; or of a midwestern computer technician named Peter Holmes, whose Scandinavian-born grandfather was a fisherman named Per Hansa; or of Joe Martin, whose father, José Martinez, was a highly skilled cigar maker from Havana. In a way, it is the story of millions of immigrant families who left the economically and culturally confining Old World towns where they were raised, and paid for the freedom and prosperity this country offered with their pasts.
At first, it must have seemed like a marvelous bargain. For most of the twentieth century, melting-pot America was like the pot of gold at the end of history s rainbow. In this land of limitless possibilities, one s past seemed to be an encumbrance: something that was filled with atavistic superstitions, that was anathema to enlightened people, that presented an obstacle to personal progress.
But now, America s power is waning; we are living in a post-Copernican age, where we are no longer the center of the world. The country no longer seems to promise my generation-or my children s-the degree of social or physical mobility it promised my parents and grandparents.
As a result, many people who might have once explored the nation s physical or economic frontiers are journeying inward: they are Kit Carsons of the soul. Some adopt creeds that are new to them-Eastern religions, or an all-embracing born-again Christianity. But many, like me, seek to synthesize their Old World heritage with the America that has shaped their consciousness.
In many cases, they travel or seek to recapture their pasts by the use of new tools of genealogical research that have proliferated since Alex Haley published Roots. Those techniques help provide the information, the textures of experience, which transform an ethnic label into a distinct, three-dimensional identity. But they don t provide the spiritual nourishment which is, at last, the thing most of us yearn for.
Sometimes a seeker encounters a person who embodies the faith and the history he craves. That can happen as an apparent accident-Carlos Castañeda describes his involvement with Don Juan as such. It can result from the kind of search Alex Haley made when he voyaged to the African country of Gambia, and then to the town of Juffure, where he met a griot, an old man, a storyteller, who told him about his ancestor, Kunte Kinte.
My own friendship with Rabbi Joseph Singer, my teacher, is the result of my father s guidance, my journalist s luck, my own planning. That relationship still contains a large element of mystery. For, like most transmitters of faith, Rabbi Singer s power resides in the part of his personality that has withstood the lures of twentieth-century rationalism, and therefore preserved what is most compelling about traditional Judaism.
Of course, like most seekers, I have had to find my own way into faith. It is a voyage that never seems to end. That is why, as some readers will note, I have been vague about some details of ritual observance which seem to grow more important to me from one year to the next.
I am describing a journey, not the landscape of the destination. This is an account of my effort to recover my ancestral legacy-through journalism and politics, by uncovering the details of my family s past and becoming involved with the religion I inherited, and by accepting the emotionally difficult realization that life defies reason: life unfolds unpredictably; it contains treasures and sorrows that none of us can foresee. I hope the story of my search will help other orphans in history find their way home.

PART ONE

1
For more than four years now, I have been embarked on a wondrous, confusing voyage through time and culture. Until 1976, when I was thirty-six, I had always identified myself as an American Jew. Now I am an American and a Jew. I live at once in the years 1982 and 5743, the Jewish year in which I am publishing this book. I am Paul Cowan, the New York-bred son of Louis Cowan and Pauline Spiegel Cowan, Chicago-born, very American, very successful parents; and I am Saul Cohen, the descendant of rabbis in Germany and Lithuania. I am the grandson of Modie Spiegel, a mail-order magnate, who was born a Reform Jew, became a Christian Scientist, and died in his spacious house in the wealthy gentile suburb of Kenilworth, Illinois, with a picture of Jesus Christ in his breast pocket; and of Jacob Cohen, a used-cement-bag dealer from Chicago, an Orthodox Jew, who lost everything he had-his wife, his son, his business, his self-esteem-except for the superstition-tinged faith that gave moments of structure and meaning to his last, lonely years.
As a child, growing up on Manhattan s East Side, I lived among Jewish WASPs. My father, an only child, had changed his name from Cohen to Cowan when he was twenty-one. He was so guarded about his youth that he never let my brother or sisters or me meet any of his father s relatives. I always thought of myself as a Cowan-the Welsh word for stonecutter-not a Cohen-a member of the Jewish priestly caste. My family celebrated Christmas and always gathered for an Easter dinner of ham and sweet potatoes. At Choate, the Episcopalian prep school to which my parents sent me, I was often stirred by the regal hymns we sang during the mandatory chapel service. In those years, I barely knew what a Passover seder was. I didn t know anyone who practiced archaic customs such as keeping kosher or lighting candles on Friday night. Neither my parents nor I ever mentioned the possibility of a bar mitzvah. In 1965, I fell in love with Rachel Brown, a New England Protestant whose ancestors came here in the seventeenth century. It didn t matter the least bit to her-or to me-that we were an interfaith marriage.
Now, at forty-two, I care more