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An Orphan in History: One Man's Triumphant Search for His Jewish Roots
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.
288 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1982
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
July 8, 2016
A few years ago I came across this book somewhere, maybe on Amazon; the title resonated with me and I thought I'd like to read it someday. Subsequently I found it in my synagogue's library, where it could wait for whenever the spirit moved me to pick it up, or so I thought. As it turned out, I was lucky to nab it before it got culled in the name of progress, being that it hails from 1982.
As I began to read, I was thinking, no, this isn't like my family. The author's maternal grandparents were the Spiegels of Spiegel catalog fame. His father, who had started out in PR, became president of CBS on the basis of the success of his brainchild "The $64,000 Question," then was made the sacrificial lamb to cleanse CBS' reputation after the quiz show scandals of the 1950s--even though he himself was not responsible for any wrongdoing.
The author's various relatives were business successes or professional people. They were all cut off from their pasts, though--lost in America, you could say. The Spiegels in trying to find their way and successfully adapt had converted to Christian Science. His Spiegel grandfather was a loud obnoxious person who was preoccupied with money, and that grandmother, having, as the author says, no intellectual interests, lived a rudderless existence spending her time and her husband's money on unending home redecoration.
His father in his own bid for adaptation to early twentieth century America had at 21 years old morphed from Lou Cohen to Louis G. Cowan and broken off from his n'er-do-well father Jake, who had driven a family business into bankruptcy and upheld his image of himself as a Robin Hood-style benefactor of poor Jewish immigrants by petty financial fraud. That grandfather, while a morbid embarrassment for Louis, was beloved by other cousins, and the author thinks he would somehow have been better taken in stride back in the old country. The author grew up with little contact with his father's branch of the family, who were more recent immigrants from Eastern Europe.
Dad was torn. He was so touchy about his background that he told the author as a child that "Cohen" was not even really the family name; that the immigrants had changed their name so as to bolster their importance in America by associating themselves with descendants of the priestly caste, the Kohanim. It was only at his father's funeral that a previously unknown relative appeared and confirmed, that, yes, that was the family name and that in fact they were descended from rabbinical royalty so to speak. Moreover, aside from the offending grandfather Jacob Cohen, the American descendants were industrious and successful people. They, too, though, had mostly lost their religion in their drive to put down American roots.
On the other hand, his dad retained some deep connection to his family and Jewish world, having continued to support the black-sheep father financially for the rest of his life. Once shed of CBS, he involved himself with ideas and books and publishing and became a professor at Brandeis, where he mentored the media careers of his students.
The author's family when he was growing up maintained virtually no Jewish practice or learning. They celebrated Christmas and Easter, too, the latter with ham which his father seemed to choke down uncomfortably. The author was sent to an Episcopalian prep school where he and other Jews--and a working-class Italian and a Spanish immigrant there on scholarship and an exchange student, etc.--were targeted, but which he overcame by creating, along with the other "oddballs," a glamorous avant gard literary clique that was successful on student terms. He had social skills and intellectual resources and, I think, was an all-round nice guy.
While at Choate, the prep school, he learned that he was comfortable defending others, but not himself. His mother had groomed him to "take care of the less fortunate," but he was unprepared for the fact that he, with his de-Judaized name and his non-ethnic good looks and assimilated ways--he who, in other words, could "pass"--that he, too, was subjected to personal abuse. When that happened, he was both confused and surprised plus stymied by the feeling that it was somehow beneath himself to fight back.
He realized then that nobody cared how he looked, whether he celebrated Christmas or Jewish holidays, or what his name was--that unless he totally jettisoned his Judaism he was fair game. And that was the beginning of his resolution not to be driven off.
I think his main aims, then, in his quest to reclaim his Judaism, were restoration of a sense of self and sheer belongingness which he received with relief, joy, and gratitude. The subtitle on the reissued book reads, One Man's Triumphant Search for his Jewish Roots, but "triumphant" is easy to misread. I prefer the original subtitle, Retrieving a Jewish Legacy.
The author himself must have had a degree of celebrity in his day. He had been a long-time journalist for The Village Voice; there are allusions to book reviews and articles for Rolling Stone. Yet his tone is quite down to earth and characterized by humility. He's a good writer, as you might guess from his background, and he's easy to like.
Another talent is the ability to look at himself. And to remember how he felt at earlier points and before he underwent some change. And the ability to see himself from more than one angle, for instance, the viewpoint of others. Those talents aren't so common, you know.
Example: when at an earlier point he told a Christian girlfriend he was thinking of changing his name "back" to "Saul Cohen"--something he never actually got close to doing since it would "wound (his) father far more deeply than it would satisfy him"-- he interpreted her response, that that wasn't him and that he didn't want to return to the ghetto (while meanwhile rubbing her hands in a Shylock-like gesture), as a flash of bigotry illuminating her inner feelings, and he never went out with her again. Years later when he had the chance to discuss the episode with the former girlfriend, he found she also remembered it. It seems that at dinner with his family, a sister had brought up pride at being a Jew, and the girlfriend had begun to feel so excluded that she went outside and cried. Then, later, he discovered, when he shared that fantasy of changing his name, she thought he was one of the chosen people who looks down on everyone else.
At an early point I figured out this author was only five years older than me. I often do that. Even in novels I try to place the action in time. So, I wondered where he was now. It was at that point I discovered his obituary. He had contracted leukemia in 1987, and by 1988, only six years after publishing this book, he was dead at 48.
That is not supposed to happen in America! Afterward the book took on an added poignancy for me, for example, when he discussed his plans for the future or said it would take "decades" for his children's religious decisions to emerge. At 42 he entirely lacked the sense of a foreshortened future an older person may acquire.
The fact of his death lent a prophetic quality to some of his pronouncements about the events of his day, conclusions that seem strangely relevant to today. For example, seeing the 1971 protests of poor Jewish immigrants against a housing project for blacks in their Queens neighborhood, or those of West Virginia Christian fundamentalists in 1974 against educational liberalization, as something other than reactionary and bigoted. Perhaps the issues were those of competing claims, not good versus evil. Perhaps what the left failed to realize is that those protesters wanted what the upper middle class guys already had but so easily took for granted: security and safety.
He's also good on the new left's violent turn--on the violent provocations to get the action started that at first it was de rigueur not to mention--on telling the truth. On the deterioration of the 1972 Peace Corps mission to Ecuador due to arrogant and elitist American attitudes, and the subsequent laying of blame on the recipients for their failure to benefit...
The post-1965 breakdown of the Civil Rights movement into charges of racism sounds particularly modern-day:
Here is ink: a 2004 review of another one of Paul Cowan's books, The Tribes of America: Journalistic Discoveries of Our People and Their Cultures. A journalist had discovered the then-30-year-old book and is extolling its merits. (In case my praise has been insufficiently eloquent)
This may be one of those books I get excited about, where I start buying up copies and giving them away. :-)
As I began to read, I was thinking, no, this isn't like my family. The author's maternal grandparents were the Spiegels of Spiegel catalog fame. His father, who had started out in PR, became president of CBS on the basis of the success of his brainchild "The $64,000 Question," then was made the sacrificial lamb to cleanse CBS' reputation after the quiz show scandals of the 1950s--even though he himself was not responsible for any wrongdoing.
The author's various relatives were business successes or professional people. They were all cut off from their pasts, though--lost in America, you could say. The Spiegels in trying to find their way and successfully adapt had converted to Christian Science. His Spiegel grandfather was a loud obnoxious person who was preoccupied with money, and that grandmother, having, as the author says, no intellectual interests, lived a rudderless existence spending her time and her husband's money on unending home redecoration.
His father in his own bid for adaptation to early twentieth century America had at 21 years old morphed from Lou Cohen to Louis G. Cowan and broken off from his n'er-do-well father Jake, who had driven a family business into bankruptcy and upheld his image of himself as a Robin Hood-style benefactor of poor Jewish immigrants by petty financial fraud. That grandfather, while a morbid embarrassment for Louis, was beloved by other cousins, and the author thinks he would somehow have been better taken in stride back in the old country. The author grew up with little contact with his father's branch of the family, who were more recent immigrants from Eastern Europe.
Dad was torn. He was so touchy about his background that he told the author as a child that "Cohen" was not even really the family name; that the immigrants had changed their name so as to bolster their importance in America by associating themselves with descendants of the priestly caste, the Kohanim. It was only at his father's funeral that a previously unknown relative appeared and confirmed, that, yes, that was the family name and that in fact they were descended from rabbinical royalty so to speak. Moreover, aside from the offending grandfather Jacob Cohen, the American descendants were industrious and successful people. They, too, though, had mostly lost their religion in their drive to put down American roots.
On the other hand, his dad retained some deep connection to his family and Jewish world, having continued to support the black-sheep father financially for the rest of his life. Once shed of CBS, he involved himself with ideas and books and publishing and became a professor at Brandeis, where he mentored the media careers of his students.
The author's family when he was growing up maintained virtually no Jewish practice or learning. They celebrated Christmas and Easter, too, the latter with ham which his father seemed to choke down uncomfortably. The author was sent to an Episcopalian prep school where he and other Jews--and a working-class Italian and a Spanish immigrant there on scholarship and an exchange student, etc.--were targeted, but which he overcame by creating, along with the other "oddballs," a glamorous avant gard literary clique that was successful on student terms. He had social skills and intellectual resources and, I think, was an all-round nice guy.
While at Choate, the prep school, he learned that he was comfortable defending others, but not himself. His mother had groomed him to "take care of the less fortunate," but he was unprepared for the fact that he, with his de-Judaized name and his non-ethnic good looks and assimilated ways--he who, in other words, could "pass"--that he, too, was subjected to personal abuse. When that happened, he was both confused and surprised plus stymied by the feeling that it was somehow beneath himself to fight back.
He realized then that nobody cared how he looked, whether he celebrated Christmas or Jewish holidays, or what his name was--that unless he totally jettisoned his Judaism he was fair game. And that was the beginning of his resolution not to be driven off.
I think his main aims, then, in his quest to reclaim his Judaism, were restoration of a sense of self and sheer belongingness which he received with relief, joy, and gratitude. The subtitle on the reissued book reads, One Man's Triumphant Search for his Jewish Roots, but "triumphant" is easy to misread. I prefer the original subtitle, Retrieving a Jewish Legacy.
The author himself must have had a degree of celebrity in his day. He had been a long-time journalist for The Village Voice; there are allusions to book reviews and articles for Rolling Stone. Yet his tone is quite down to earth and characterized by humility. He's a good writer, as you might guess from his background, and he's easy to like.
Another talent is the ability to look at himself. And to remember how he felt at earlier points and before he underwent some change. And the ability to see himself from more than one angle, for instance, the viewpoint of others. Those talents aren't so common, you know.
Example: when at an earlier point he told a Christian girlfriend he was thinking of changing his name "back" to "Saul Cohen"--something he never actually got close to doing since it would "wound (his) father far more deeply than it would satisfy him"-- he interpreted her response, that that wasn't him and that he didn't want to return to the ghetto (while meanwhile rubbing her hands in a Shylock-like gesture), as a flash of bigotry illuminating her inner feelings, and he never went out with her again. Years later when he had the chance to discuss the episode with the former girlfriend, he found she also remembered it. It seems that at dinner with his family, a sister had brought up pride at being a Jew, and the girlfriend had begun to feel so excluded that she went outside and cried. Then, later, he discovered, when he shared that fantasy of changing his name, she thought he was one of the chosen people who looks down on everyone else.
At an early point I figured out this author was only five years older than me. I often do that. Even in novels I try to place the action in time. So, I wondered where he was now. It was at that point I discovered his obituary. He had contracted leukemia in 1987, and by 1988, only six years after publishing this book, he was dead at 48.
That is not supposed to happen in America! Afterward the book took on an added poignancy for me, for example, when he discussed his plans for the future or said it would take "decades" for his children's religious decisions to emerge. At 42 he entirely lacked the sense of a foreshortened future an older person may acquire.
The fact of his death lent a prophetic quality to some of his pronouncements about the events of his day, conclusions that seem strangely relevant to today. For example, seeing the 1971 protests of poor Jewish immigrants against a housing project for blacks in their Queens neighborhood, or those of West Virginia Christian fundamentalists in 1974 against educational liberalization, as something other than reactionary and bigoted. Perhaps the issues were those of competing claims, not good versus evil. Perhaps what the left failed to realize is that those protesters wanted what the upper middle class guys already had but so easily took for granted: security and safety.
He's also good on the new left's violent turn--on the violent provocations to get the action started that at first it was de rigueur not to mention--on telling the truth. On the deterioration of the 1972 Peace Corps mission to Ecuador due to arrogant and elitist American attitudes, and the subsequent laying of blame on the recipients for their failure to benefit...
The post-1965 breakdown of the Civil Rights movement into charges of racism sounds particularly modern-day:
...(A)s a civil-rights worker in Vicksburg, Mississippi, I found myself caught in a web of disastrous relations between blacks and whites, where normal fears and misunderstandings....were almost always defined as signs of racism, not human frailties. Instead of transcending ourselves, we began to turn on ourselves. So the movement began to tear itself apart at the moment of its greatest triumph.
Here is ink: a 2004 review of another one of Paul Cowan's books, The Tribes of America: Journalistic Discoveries of Our People and Their Cultures. A journalist had discovered the then-30-year-old book and is extolling its merits. (In case my praise has been insufficiently eloquent)
This may be one of those books I get excited about, where I start buying up copies and giving them away. :-)
October 7, 2009
I will finish reading this book....but, just have to note a major theme to open discussion. Cowan in his family odyssey emphasizes the riff and cultural divide at the turn of the 20th century in America between GERMAN JEWS and EASTERN EUROPEAN JEWS. I hadn't been aware of this, largely because I feel like German Jews in America were assimilated so long ago, that offspring don't identify as such today.
Before reading this book, I'd also note that this has got to be one of the first memoir-as-identity-proclamation books to hit the shelves. I'm reading a copy printed in 1982. While I sit there and think of subsequent memoirs that did a better job delineating the passage between American and Other, a part of me is really moved by the proximity to the time he describes -- largely, radicalism in the 1960s.
They say that identifying as a Jew in the 1970s was the same as "coming out" as a homosexual in 1990s. Cowan's work is certainty a testament to this, as his writing conveys the movement and economy of journalistic writing. This book won't change anyone's life; it's just a great blueprint of how to write such a memoir, steeped in identity, without the politics.
Before reading this book, I'd also note that this has got to be one of the first memoir-as-identity-proclamation books to hit the shelves. I'm reading a copy printed in 1982. While I sit there and think of subsequent memoirs that did a better job delineating the passage between American and Other, a part of me is really moved by the proximity to the time he describes -- largely, radicalism in the 1960s.
They say that identifying as a Jew in the 1970s was the same as "coming out" as a homosexual in 1990s. Cowan's work is certainty a testament to this, as his writing conveys the movement and economy of journalistic writing. This book won't change anyone's life; it's just a great blueprint of how to write such a memoir, steeped in identity, without the politics.
October 9, 2016
I first read “An Orphan in History” when I was in my twenties, when I was your typical disaffected and disinterested Jew.
An Orthodox friend of mine had recommended it – and if he had an agenda, it worked, at least sort of.
While I didn’t go completely Orthodox, this book reignited my passion and rebuilt my connection to Judaism.
Paul Cowan helped me locate myself in history, helped me understand the gifts and obligations that come with being part of a 3,000-year-old communal tradition. He inspired me to live simultaneously in 5777 (the Hebrew year in which this review was written) and 2016, inspired me to embrace both my Jewish and my American identities.
While the book primarily appeals to Jewish readers, it speaks powerfully to the majority of Americans, the hundreds of millions of people who find themselves estranged from their ancestral histories.
Sadly, Paul Cowan died just a few years after this book was published. But three decades later, his journey to Judaism still resonates.
An Orthodox friend of mine had recommended it – and if he had an agenda, it worked, at least sort of.
While I didn’t go completely Orthodox, this book reignited my passion and rebuilt my connection to Judaism.
Paul Cowan helped me locate myself in history, helped me understand the gifts and obligations that come with being part of a 3,000-year-old communal tradition. He inspired me to live simultaneously in 5777 (the Hebrew year in which this review was written) and 2016, inspired me to embrace both my Jewish and my American identities.
While the book primarily appeals to Jewish readers, it speaks powerfully to the majority of Americans, the hundreds of millions of people who find themselves estranged from their ancestral histories.
Sadly, Paul Cowan died just a few years after this book was published. But three decades later, his journey to Judaism still resonates.
October 22, 2009
Paul is my brother, and the family he writes about is mine too. I love this book and have read it many times over the years since he first published it.
January 29, 2016
I wasn't expecting a lot from this memoir; here you have a very wealthy American, with no relationship with his Jewish roots at all, who grew up amongst the great Spiegel fortune. Why is he interested as an adult? Is he trying to co-opt a relgion's history of strife in order to find meaning in his own life? And yet - he has a lovely, engaging humility regarding walking into parts of his own history that he feels he doesn't own, doesn't know, and yet wants to understand. He is genuinely engaging, and his search for understanding something is that is - and yet, isn't - in him, is the kind of search we all go through when trying to understand where we come from and how it affects us, even if we haven't absorbed it culturally or empirically. His series of epiphanies are compelling and thought-provoking as well as utterly satisfying - for himself as well as for the reader. To be humble, and to keep an open mind, can open up worlds that we currently don't even know exist. It was a great read.
August 13, 2010
The best memoir I have ever read. Paulo Cowan, the author, knew how to write. Elegant prose, insightful without self-pity. Wonderful to read. And moving, too.
May 15, 2022
I read this book when it was published in 1981 and it changed my life. Now that I am writing about my own family's acknowledgment of Judaism, I decided to read it again. I remembered it differently than my reintroduction, but regardless, the theme is still the same: the author struggles with his Jewish identity and ultimately finds solace. Of course, he is much more of an intellectual than I am and his outcomes are different than mine, but there are many similarities as well. We both had lineage that was partially German and partially Eastern European. We both tried to bury our Jewish identities and we both lived in Chicago though he wound up in New York and I wound up in Colorado. I struggled with reading the book the second time through because the author (who died in his forties from leukemia) meanders and mixes his family trees a lot. Still, there is no difficulty in assessing family relationships, always a subject I like to read about. And some of the profiles of the people who influenced him are particularly interesting. He's a journalist so he follows people around and makes observations about how they live and sometimes absorbs their beliefs and other times rejects them. I love this book because he elevates my struggles to find my own identity.
June 1, 2023
This was an incredibly touching book, filled with emotion. It chronicles one man's journey from completely assimilated Jew to finding a strong connection to his faith by mid-life.
I loved the way Cowan sketches the entire evolution of his path to observant Jew. After a childhood in which his Jewish family celebrated Christmas, Cowan searched for the roots that would ground him in Judaism. Along the way, he became involved in the civil rights movement, befriended Orthodox rabbis, joined a havurah (prayer group), and tested the waters bit by bit until his ultimate foray into a committed Jewish life.
What was probably most poignant to me was that his gentile wife, Rachel, was at his side 100 percent, so much so that by the end of the book we learn that she eventually becomes a Reform rabbi.
Although this book focuses on the journey home to Judaism, it would be an incredible choice for anyone struggling to find their spiritual foundation.
Truly a must-read!
I loved the way Cowan sketches the entire evolution of his path to observant Jew. After a childhood in which his Jewish family celebrated Christmas, Cowan searched for the roots that would ground him in Judaism. Along the way, he became involved in the civil rights movement, befriended Orthodox rabbis, joined a havurah (prayer group), and tested the waters bit by bit until his ultimate foray into a committed Jewish life.
What was probably most poignant to me was that his gentile wife, Rachel, was at his side 100 percent, so much so that by the end of the book we learn that she eventually becomes a Reform rabbi.
Although this book focuses on the journey home to Judaism, it would be an incredible choice for anyone struggling to find their spiritual foundation.
Truly a must-read!
March 17, 2023
Read as part of our Read and Discuss (RAD) Texas book club series on "Being Ethnic, Becoming American." Mr. Cowan's personal story describes both why and how he ended up researching his family history - a Jewish family coming from Lithuania and the cultural adjustments and family frictions that led to their Americanization and falling away from Judaism - and his return to the practices of Judaism as a result.
The story resonates because change is inevitable when cultures come together but although he talks about some of the practices, I would have liked a dictionary of the Jewish terms for a better understanding and may even do some research to add that to our group's discussion.
The story resonates because change is inevitable when cultures come together but although he talks about some of the practices, I would have liked a dictionary of the Jewish terms for a better understanding and may even do some research to add that to our group's discussion.
January 30, 2022
An engrossing look at themes of assimilation, identity and tribalism in America, through the eyes of someone discovering their jewish identity and seeing parallels between antisemitism and the equal rights movement. Moves between the many jewish worlds in the USA and their roots in European and Mediterranean culture. A good read.
February 20, 2025
The 2 parts of the book made sense as a separation to his family’s story then his own story. It is written in a “this happened then this happened then this happened” fashion so it does get boring to read. But it’s a good story of Cowan finding himself.
April 27, 2007
Highly secular modern guy, reconnects with his Jewishness- sensitive interplay on an interfaith marriage
February 14, 2008
So much better this second time around! (first time read in high school)
December 22, 2008
I loved this book.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews