Vol. 147: To set the record straight

My response to the New York Review of Books

Caroline Fraser won the 2017 National Book Critics Circle Award as well as the 2018 Pulitzer Prize, both bestowed for Prairie Fires, her biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder. She holds a Ph.D. from Harvard and has written for The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic Monthly, and The London Review of Books.

As I’ve often observed— most recently, just two weeks ago in my discussion of the award-winning biographer Ron Chernow— impressive credentials aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. But today I want to address an equally important question: How do high-powered writers and publications respond when they commit a howling mistake, or even a minor one? Do they rush to set the record straight? Or do they try to ignore it in the hope that no one will notice that they’re fallible humans?

The question is not academic. Three years ago, Fraser wrote a piece in the New York Review of Books that contained one such howler about a matter with which I was intimately involved. I wrote a polite letter of correction to the New York Review and sent a copy to Fraser herself. The letter was never published, and I never heard back from Fraser.

I’ve been sitting on that letter ever since, wondering what to do with it. But now the answer occurs to me: Of course! I’ll share it with you. At the very least, maybe you’ll learn something about the subject at hand: genealogy.

And if you think I’m overreacting, please let me know. (I already know I’m a fallible human.)

Letter to the New York Review of Books

June 6, 2022

To the Editors:

In her review of Francesca Morgan’s A Nation of Descendants (NYR, May 12), Caroline Fraser argues that genealogy “thwarts our emotional needs, revealing only fragments of a story.” She also remarks that “Jewish families’ post-Holocaust curiosity reached a heightened pitch with the popularity of the musical Fiddler on the Roof, which premiered on Broadway in 1964, a phenomenon that led researchers straight to the extensive records held in Salt Lake City.” As the author of Finding Our Fathers (Random House), which launched the modern Jewish genealogy movement in 1977, I would dispute both assertions.

Jewish interest in genealogy was almost nonexistent prior to the publication of Finding Our Fathers, the first English-language guide to tracing Jewish ancestors. At that time, virtually all American Jews, traumatized by the Holocaust and preoccupied with asserting their American identity, resisted tracing their ancestors and in any case assumed that the task was impossible. In my lonely pursuit of this hobby since the 1950s, I often found myself wishing that someone would write a guidebook for Jewish genealogists. As I describe in my recent memoir, The Education of a Journalist, my frustration led me to produce such a book myself, despite my lack of rabbinic or scholarly credentials.

Finding Our Fathers had the good fortune to be published at precisely the moment when the entire country was salivating over Roots, Alex Haley’s best-selling 1976 exercise in Black genealogy. It also arrived at a time when second- and third-generation American Jews began to demonstrate the validity of Marcus Hansen’s law of immigrant families: “What the son wishes to forget, the grandson wishes to remember.” By the late 1970s, secure in their American identities, American Jews of my baby-boomer generation were eager to assert their roots and preserve their heritage before the traces of our European backgrounds were lost forever.

Racist purposes?

Perhaps most important, Finding Our Fathers arrived at a watershed moment in the history of technology. Thanks to photocopy machines, microfilm, and computers, all those arcane historical documents that were once the private preserve of scholars and librarians now became accessible to mass audiences.

The subsequent introduction of the Internet and DNA testing, plus the collapse of the Soviet bloc (which released vast troves of previously suppressed records), exponentially expanded this interest. The modern Jewish genealogy movement has since blossomed into a formidable cottage industry embracing dozens of local, national, and international societies, esoteric research publications, extensive computer databases, global conventions, and academic institutions, all involving literally thousands of professionals and amateurs whose research has far transcended my wildest dreams back in the ’70s.

Fraser correctly notes that genealogy has often been used for racist or exclusionary purposes. But genealogy today is more concerned with discovering who we are and where we came from, and with fitting our individual lives into the larger context of world history. There are worse hobbies than one that constantly reminds its clients that each of us is merely a link in a chain that existed long before we were born and will continue long after we’re gone.

Our forgotten ancestors

Conventional wisdom holds that billions of people who once walked the Earth have been lost to history, and that the task of identifying these lost people grows more difficult if not impossible with the passage of time. Actually, the reverse is true: Thanks to modern research tools that barely existed a generation ago (not to mention the specialization that inevitably accompanies population growth), today we know much more about the past than any past historian ever did.

It is not unreasonable to suggest that, in some future day, millions of genealogists, armed with professional training and technological tools we can’t even imagine, will be able to reconstruct the lives of billions of individuals, Jewish and Gentile, who perished in wars, holocausts, plagues, and Crusades since the dawn of time. When that happens, these once anonymous victims will come to life again in ways that no one ever imagined possible. Genealogy, I submit, is at the beginning of its history, not its end/.

Dan Rottenberg
Philadelphia PA

Enjoy Dan Rottenberg’s new memoir, The Education of a Journalist: My Seventy Years on the Frontiers of Free Speech. You can also visit his website at www.danrottenberg.com