Looking for Lost Bird: A Jewish Woman Discovers Her Navajo Roots [Hardcover]

Yvette Melanson (Author), Claire Safran (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1, 1999

 

In this haunting memoir, Yvette Melanson tells of being raised to believe that she was white and Jewish. At age forty-three, she learned that she was a "Lost Bird," a Navajo child taken against her family's wishes, and that her grieving birth mother had never stopped looking for her until the day she died. In this haunting memoir, Yvette Melanson tells of being raised to believe that she was white and Jewish. At age forty-three, she learned that she was a "Lost Bird," a Navajo child taken against her family's wishes, and that her grieving birth mother had never stopped looking for her until the day she died.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

While growing up as an adopted child in a Jewish family, the author of this compelling memoir never quite fit in with expectations of who she was supposed to be. She didn't look Jewish. She wasn't the boy that her father wanted?though she tried to be. Even her adoring mother found something to nudge her about: "Be a lady. Sit still. Don't act like a wild Indian." On the Internet, with help she attributes to both kind strangers and the Great Spirit, Melanson discovers the reason she didn't fit in, uncovering the bizarre truth that she is, in fact, Navajo. "Funny," everyone says to her, "you don't look Indian." This memoir of an extraordinarily eventful life is crafted like the rugs that Melanson has learned to make in the tradition of her birth family. First, she strings the warp of her story: her adoptive mother's adoration and death; her adoptive father's abandonment and his new wife's rejection of her; the tragic loves, deaths and separations that scarred her life; the happiness she finds with her far-from-perfect husband, Dickie; and the love she receives from her newfound birth family on a Navajo reservation. As she weaves, the patterns emerge, and, each time she reintroduces a thread, she explains that aspect of her life in more detail. The present tense from which she looks back is always moving forward in time as Melanson writes about her efforts to try to integrate the person she had been with the person she is becoming.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

You've seen the author on 20/20 and Maury Povich; now read the book. As a child, Melanson was adopted on the black market by Jewish parents and only as an adult learned that she was Navajo, stolen from her mother at birth.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: William Morrow; 1st edition (March 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0380976013
• ISBN-13: 978-0380976010
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.9 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #622,361 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful story about loved ones being reunited!, May 16, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Looking for Lost Bird: A Jewish Woman Discovers Her Navajo Roots (Paperback)

Like many of the readers I couldn't put the book down until I read it from cover to cover. While reading the story I found out these people were my extended family! I know everyone mentioned in the book. As a youngster I remember the crusade of Aunt Desbah, Uncle John and others in finding the twins who were stolen as babies. I wept at the end when Yvette participated in the holy Hozhoji ceremony to be reunited with her birth place, family, culture, and environment. Very moving!

Aunt Betty, Yvette's biological mother lived a very brave life as she longed and searched everyday of her life wanting to be reunited with her twins. May God bless her soul.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A poignant uplifting story about finding one's roots + place, February 2, 1999

By 

Larry Mark "editor of MyJewishBooks.com" (nyc) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Looking for Lost Bird: A Jewish Woman Discovers Her Navajo Roots (Hardcover)

A few years ago, NBC-TV did a story about a 43 year old Jewish woman who, when she sought out her birth parents, discovered that she was actually born to a Navajo family. Yvette was a lost bird, the name Native Americans give to their children who were stolen by "well-meaning" white social workers and others. This is Yvette's fascinating story. Yvette Melanson was born "out West" in the 1950's, adopted by a Jewish couple in Miami, and raised in New York City in a wealthy, doting, Jewish family. Although she knew she was adopted, her parents always deflected questions about her roots, but did let it slip that she had a twin brother. When her mother died a painful death when Yvette was just a young teenager, Yvette's father blamed Yvette, rejected her, and soon remarried a woman who treated Yvette worse than Cinderella. So I don't give away any more juicy details, suffice it to say that Yvette moved to a Kibbutz in Israel at 17, was injured as a soldier during the '73 Yom Kippur War, returned to the U.S., joined the US Navy, and settled in Maine to raise a family. Can you believe that at her father's funeral, a stranger had to ask her stepmother to move over so Yvette could sit in the family pew? Can you believe such a family? Upon discovering her true birth heritage a while after the funeral, we follow Yvette as she meets her Navajo family, learns the truth, tries to fit into Navajo culture, which is sometimes at odds with a more loud, New York City/Israeli/Jewish one, and finds similarities between her Jewish faith and Navajo culture. Will she fit in? Will she find her twin brother? Can a Jewish woman find peace on the res? A fascinating cross-cultural story

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Looking for Lost Bird: A Review, March 5, 2004

By 

elliot fein (Irvine, California United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Looking for Lost Bird: A Jewish Woman Discovers Her Navajo Roots (Paperback)

Looking For Lost Bird:
A Jewish Woman Discovers Her Navajo Roots.
Yvette Melanson with Claire Safron
Bard Books. 233 pages. $22.00
By Elliot Fein

Looking For Lost Bird is a true story that is disturbing yet compelling. A Native American Navajo Indian woman gives birth on her reservation home in Arizona to twins, a girl and a boy. During their infancy, both children get sick. The mother takes the children to the nearest local hospital for a diagnosis.

Hospital staff members instruct her that they will need to keep the two children over night for observations. When the mother returns the next day, the children are gone. The hospital has no record that they were ever admitted.

The kidnapped infant children are each adopted in Florida by two different families. One of the families is a young Jewish couple that lives in a New York City suburb. Looking for Lost Bird is the story of the Navajo girl, Yvette Melanson, who is raised in that Jewish household.

As an adult, Melanson discovers her Navajo origins and searches for her family roots. She finds her family (minus her mother, who died of a broken heart grieving for two lost children) still living on the Navajo reservation in which she was born. At the age of forty-three, Melanson decides first to visit her birth family in Arizona, then to move there permanently with her husband and two children.

While adjusting to the reservation, Melanson learns and begins practicing the religion, culture, and way of life of her birth family. In this process, she abandons many of the Jewish cultural practices (but not necessarily Jewish values) in which she was raised.

Melanson's Jewish parents (particularly her mother) provide a loving and caring environment for their daughter. In Yvette's recollection of how she was raised, their warts do surface, particularly the shortcomings of her father. After her mother becomes ill and eventually dies during her teen years, the father changes into a different, less appealing character.

Melanson never reveals whether her Jewish parents knew about her Navajo origins. The reader is left to speculate whether the knowledge, if known by her Jewish parents that she was stolen from a Native American Indian family would have impacted their decision to adopt.

What is surprising in the telling of this life story is the absence of any form of anti-Semitism by the author. When Melanson writes critically about her mother and father, she writes about them as individuals. She does not associate her criticism of them with Judaism as a faith tradition.

On the reservation, when she begins taking on Native American Indian ways, Melanson naturally compares Navajo culture to Judaism. In this comparison, Melanson writes with respect, affection, and even admiration about the religious tradition in which she was raised.

Melanson tells her life story (with the help of Claire Safron) with compassion, humor, and eloquence.

I recently led a book club at my synagogue. A member of the club recommended that I read Looking for Lost Bird. After reading it, we immediately decided to include Looking for Lost Bird one of our featured selections. The book provides a great opportunity to learn about Navajo culture and to see how it compares to Judaism as a religious tradition. The book is also a true gift for adopted individuals, particularly native American Indians, seeking to uncover their past.

Elliot Fein teaches Jewish Studies in the Tarbut V'Torah School in Irvine.