What They Saved: Pieces of a Jewish Past [Hardcover]

Nancy K. Miller (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 2011

Winner of the 2012 Jewish Journal Book Prize

After her father’s death, Nancy K. Miller discovered a minuscule family archive: a handful of photographs, an unexplained land deed, a postcard from Argentina, unidentified locks of hair. These items had been passed down again and again, but what did they mean? Miller follows their traces from one distant relative to another, across the country, and across an ocean. Her story, unlike the many family memoirs focused on the Holocaust, takes us back earlier in history to the world of pogroms and mass emigrations at the turn of the twentieth century.

Searching for roots as a middle-aged orphan and an assimilated Jewish New Yorker, Miller finds herself asking unexpected questions: Why do I know so little about my family? How can I understand myself when I don’t know my past? The answers lead her to a carpenter in the Ukraine, a stationery peddler on the Lower East Side, and a gangster hanger-on in the Bronx. As a third-generation descendant of Eastern European Jews, Miller learns that the hidden lives of her ancestors reveal as much about the present as they do about the past. In the end, an odyssey to uncover the origins of her lost family becomes a memoir of renewal.

Editorial Reviews

Review

By Joanne Jacobson

Published September 20, 2011. The Forward

What They Saved: Pieces of a Jewish Past

This book's force lies...in her story-hungry presence, in the "project of rerooting" -- the emotional satisfactions of reconstructing the lost world beneath "the impenetrable layers of family silences."

"At its most brilliant, Miller's book is a writer's memoir - a book brimming with passion and intelligence. Her story engages the reader because she uncovers an unvarnished truth by sifting, assembling and ordering, and then willingly reordering the facts of a life, of many lives." - Judy Bolton-Fasman for The Jerusalem Post

jewishjournal.com/books/article/what_they_saved_wins_first_jewish_journal_book_prize_20120111/

Naomi Kramer, Jewish Book Council, December 2011

This is an unusual memoir and one well worth reading. Who knows--this book might encourage the reader to discover the source of...her own mysterious life artifacts. 

"[Miller] writes thoughtfully about her efforts to piece together a family's story of dislocation, success, and broken links, and of how, in the process, Miller reconnected with Jewish history and traditions."—Publishers Weekly

(Publishers Weekly 20110704)

"[What They Saved is] an unusual, intellectual perspective on an often-told story."—Kirkus Reviews

(Kirkus Reviews 20110701)

"Miller's suspension of the expectation of closure—her acceptance of the condition of remembering and of writing as forever incomplete—also draws her memoir deeply into the emotional experience of change that shaped modernity for Jews all over the world. And it confirms the importance of personal narrative, perhaps modernity's most recognizable voice, in framing and accepting the losses and the uncertainties of that experience."—Joanne Jacobson, Jewish Daily Forward

(Joanne Jacobson Jewish Daily Forward 20110919)

"What They Saved can be approached as an illuminating and instructive example of how to conduct a genealogical investigation. But it is also a rich and accomplished family chronicle, full of fascinating incidents and turbulent emotions. Above all, it is a searing work of self-exploration, artful and eloquent in the telling but heartbreaking in its candor."—Jonathan Kirsch, JewishJournal.com

(Jonathan Kirsch JewishJournal.com 20111004)

"This marvelous memoir pinpoints the elusive phenomenon whereby memories get through to our consciousness and how they ultimately influence our lives. Capturing moments of transformation is what happens over and over in an adept memoir like What They Saved."—Judy Bolton-Fasman, Jerusalem Post

(Judy Bolton-Fasman Jerusalem Post 20111115)

About the Author

Nancy K. Miller is distinguished professor of English and comparative literature at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She is the author or editor of more than a dozen books, most recently But Enough About Me: Why We Read Other People’s Lives and Bequest and Betrayal: Memoirs of a Parent’s Death.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 248 pages
• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press (September 1, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 080323001X
• ISBN-13: 978-0803230019
• Product Dimensions: 5.9 x 0.9 x 8.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #909,687 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #2 in Books > History > Europe > Moldova

More About the Author

NANCY K. MILLER is the author of "What They Saved," the story of how she reconstructed her family's missing past from a handful of mysterious objects passed down from her father. The strange collection--locks of hair, a postcard from Argentina, a cemetery receipt, letters written in Yiddish--moved her to search for the people who had left these traces of their lives and to understand what had happened to them. As Miller slowly pieced together her family portrait and assembled a genealogical tree, she felt connected in unexpected ways to an immigrant narrative that began in Eastern Europe at the turn of the twentieth century, when her ancestors headed for the Lower East Side of Manhattan. At the end of her decade-long quest, Miller started to imagine the life she might have had with the missing side of her family. Suspended between what had been lost and what she found, Miller finally comes to terms with the bittersweet legacy of the third generation--tantalizing fragments of disappeared worlds.

Nancy K. Miller has written, edited or co-edited more than a dozen volumes, including Getting Personal, Bequest and Betrayal, and But Enough About Me.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The Story of Jewish Immigration and Assimilation, Intimately Told September 4, 2011

By M. Dekel

Format:Hardcover

In her unique prose - highly intelligent yet disarming, funny yet bitingly sad - Nancy Miller manages to portray the singular pre-history of her assimilated New York Jewish family by following the trail of several objects, peoples, letters and places. These are the family artifacts her parents saved, and they are not many. As she persistently probes each clue, detective-style, to its logical conclusion, several mysteries are solved while others deepen: Why did her father hide his immediate family from Miller and her sister? Why was a Jerusalem plot purchased by her (non-Zionist) grandmother? Did her grandparents flee the city of Kishinev because of the infamous pogrom that took place there at the beginning of the twentieth century? Had they witnessed the atrocity? As Miller's search evolves, we sense her growing curiosity, even obsession with a past in which she formerly took little interest; yet Miller - a Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the City University of New York - never allows herself to sentimentalize or speculate but keeps her narrative tightly ground in the evidence she uncovers, or fails to uncover. Because of this, a fascinating meta-narrative is gradually and intimately revealed: that of early twentieth century Jewish immigration to the U.S. and the shaping of a new, assimilated American Jewish middle class. In what her parents saved and also in what they did not save and/or explicitly hid lays the story of an entire class: its character, its success and the price it paid for them. Miller tells this story in her compelling, conversational prose; I could not put the book down.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Reconnecting to a broken past August 31, 2011

By Laura S. Levitt

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Nancy K. Miller's most recent book is a beautiful lyrical account of her attempts to reconnect to her lost Jewish past, the legacy of her father and his family. It is an astonishingly eloquent, honest and vulnerable book that makes clear how tentative and partial these kinds of engages are. This is not a heroic tale and this is precisely what makes it a so powerful. I loved this book and recommend it to all who can appreciate the complications around what it means to try to touch a past that is always already out of our reach. This is a book about ordinary American Jews, one family story out of the archives of stories of the vast majority of Eastern European Jewish families who came to the United States at the turn of the last century. Like many of our family stories, this is a messy tale told in compelling prose. As such, it reminds us all of the riches of ordinary lives and the stories they tell. This book makes clear the power of family legacies, in this case an American Jewish family story. This is a family tale about those novelist Jonathan Rosen has called "the lucky ones," the many Eastern European Jews whose lives were not touched directly by the horrors of the Holocaust precisely because they made it to America before the Nazis rise to power.The Talmud and the Internet: A Journey between Worlds Miller reminds us that these too are stories of loss and dislocation as well as reinvention.

Laura Levitt, Professor of Religion, Jewish Studies and Gender, Temple University
American Jewish Loss after the Holocaust

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars What She Has Given Us November 10, 2011

By Jonathan Boyarin

Format:Hardcover

Nancy Miller's new book offers encouragement for all of us who struggle to balance the inheritance of our ancestors with the desire to become our own richest selves. She understands that, for all "they saved," much more is lost without recuperation. She does not stop at the loss, but works and reworks the pieces of an always incomplete puzzle. She teaches that, for those with or without religious "faith," re-learning family stories and, even more important, "coming to know when, if not why, the stories stopped" may sometimes be the most dynamic aspect of Jewishness. What she has created is an exemplary meditation on the legacy of immigrants and their descendants after a rich and brutal century has passed.

Jonathan Boyarin, Professor of Religious Studies, University of North Carolina; author of Mornings at the Stanton Street Shul: A Lower East Side Summer.