By EVELYN BARGE Palisadian-Post Intern Family stories, part of a rich oral tradition that is passed down from one generation to the next, often become the stuff of legends. ”These familial tall tales are the basis of award-winning author Robert Rosenstone’s book ‘The Man Who Swam into History: The (Mostly) True Story of My Jewish Family,’ which was published by the University of Texas Press in September. Village Books will host a signing of the book next Thursday at 7:30 p.m. ”Rosenstone, a Palisades resident since 1983, is a history professor at Cal Tech. He has written several biographical and historical books, including ‘Romantic Revolutionary: A Biography of John Reed,’ which was used as the basis of the Oscar-winning film ‘Reds.’ ”An academician for nearly 40 years, Rosenstone said it was his interest in modern history that led him to explore his own family’s past. ”’This book is about my family, an immigrant family,’ Rosenstone said. ‘It is 11 stories about different members of my family over three generations. The author looked for narrative possibilities in his family’s history and mythology by recalling the stories told and retold at family events over his lifetime. He also studied and researched first-hand accounts like his mother’s diary and newspaper clippings, and he conducted interviews with living relatives. Rosenstone’s research took him to Paris, the city where his grandfather had worked as a tailor, and to London to visit the synagogue where his grandparents were married. ”The book offers a glimpse of the immigration and Americanization of both his mother’s and father’s sides of the family. With educated, professional Latvians on the maternal side and unskilled, poorer Romanians on the paternal side, Rosenstone said this combination produced a divided family. ”’It was really an oil and water situation,’ he said. Using this conflict and the unique characters on both sides, Rosenstone documented the family’s passage from Romania to America. The story is constructed through in-depth fragments and ‘slices of a family,’ rather than a straightforward, linear narrative. ”With this approach, Rosenstone said he was able to use creative license and a bit of imagination to fill in the narrative blanks in his family history. For example, one portion of the book details the story of his grandfather who was known to have kept a lifelong mistress. Although no one in the family knew anything about the mistress except her existence, Rosenstone said he wanted to include their relationship in the book. ”’I used the facts and the story I know as a basis for imagining what their relationship must have been like.’ ”For Rosenstone, who also appears as a character, the book became an unexpected way of connecting with the past. ”’In my academic career, I had never written a book that deals with Judaism or my Jewish identity,’ he said. ‘This was my first book that was more self-reflective. Although I wasn’t consciously thinking this at the time, in retrospect it became a question of what it means for me to be Jewish.’ ”For 15 years, Rosenstone worked on the novel in his spare time or ‘when I felt moved to write,’ he said. ”Upon completion, Rosenstone shopped the book around at a dozen commercial publishers, but no one agreed to publish it, saying it was too unusual or had no audience. ”Nevertheless, he wanted the members of his family to have a nice copy of the book, so he decided to self publish five years ago through an author-subsidized book publisher, First Books, now called Inkwater Press. ”A surprise came for Rosenstone when a copy of the book wound up in the hands of Marie Theresa Hernandez, associate professor of modern and classical languages at the University of Houston. When Hernandez read the book, she told Rosenstone she would like to recommend it to her editor at the University of Texas Press, which had published her book. Rosenstone said he accepted her offer to share the book with her editor, thinking nothing would come of it. ”’A few months later, when I had pretty much forgotten about the conversation, I received an e-mail from Texas saying they had read it, loved it and would like to publish it,’ Rosenstone said. ‘I thought the book was over, honestly. Now it has a second life.’ ”The years spent writing ‘The Man Who Swam into History’ were a natural progression in his personal and professional life. ‘I was in my late 40s when I started working on it,’ he said. ‘In middle age, you really start to think about where you were in the past and how you got there.’ ”Rosenstone is beginning work on another book that picks up where ‘The Man Who Swam into History’ left off, with the author as a teenager. The project’s working title is ‘The Man Who Swam out of History.’
This page is available to subscribers. Click here to sign in or get access.
