What They Saved: Pieces of a Jewish Past

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.

Table of Contents:
Part 1. How I Found My Family in a Drawer 1. The Heiress 2. Kipnis in Memphis 3. The Report Card 4. The Photograph from Kishinev 5. The Nudnik and the Boss 6. Family Trees 7. Suicide in Argentina 8. Wolf and Virgin Part 2. Saving the Name 9. The Mayor of South Tucson 10. The Lost Scrapbook 11. Distant Cousins Part 3. Memoirs of a Wondering Jew 12. My Kishinev Pogrom 13. The Silverware from Russia 14. My Grandmother's Dunams 15. Family Hair Looms 16. Return to Kishinev 17. The Order Book Acknowledgments Sources

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 Breathless: An American Girl in Paris, But Enough About Me: Why We Read Other People’s Lives, and Bequest and Betrayal: Memoirs of a Parent’s Death.

Review :
This is an unusual memoir and one well worth reading. Who knows - this book might encourage the reader to discover the source of his or her own mysterious life artifacts. - Naomi Kramer, Jewish Book World 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 [Millers book] confirms the importance of personal narrative, perhaps modernitys most recognizable voice, in framing and accepting the losses and the uncertainties of that experience. - Joanne Jacobson, Jewish Daily Forward [Miller] found a small family archive among the possessions left to her after both her parents had died. Why so few? What do they mean? Why were these ones saved? A journey about what we can find and what is lost from life to life. - Margaret Heilbrun, Library Journal [Miller] writes thoughtfully about her efforts to piece together a familys story of dislocation, success, and broken links, and of how, in the process, Miller reconnected with Jewish history and traditions. - Publishers Weekly "In this wry, original work of detective nonfiction, Miller conjures her long-missing family out of a handful of objects found in a drawer. As she tracks clues across continents and centuries, we savor the pleasures of the chase. Alix Kates Shulman, author of To Love What Is "'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 Memoir and history relate by time and size and the questions that remain. Nancy Millers memoir, What They Saved, starts with family fragments, a sort of lost and found, with connections missing. Although it spans a period of slightly more than a hundred years, the past feels close... Nancy Miller sensitively examines her familys journey from Kishinev from a pogrom, to the US, to assimilation, and ultimately, from the Lower East Side to the Upper West Side. She explores what they saved, but between the spaces are the gaps of what has been lost. Language changes with time and we often lack the language of our forebears. Places change or disappear entirely. Jewish explorations of generations in transition are always a visit to the lost and found... What They Saved is and intimate memoir which left me with unanswered questions concerning the author and how she places herself in the more recent past of memory. - Brenda Brod, Jewish Quarterly, October 2012