An Orphan in History: One Man's Triumphant Search for his 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
You are about to embark on a wondrous voyage through time and culture. The journey carries you from the privileged world of Park Avenue to nineteenth-century Lithuania, turn-of-the-century Chicago, a contemporary Israeli kibbutz, and the timeless world of New York City's Lower East Side. Journey's end occurs in the Jewish year 5743 on Manhattan's Upper West Side, just crosstown and a lifetime away from where Paul Cowan's complicated, halting trip toward faith begins. Paul Cowan grows up unaware that he is a descendant of rabbis. In one generation five thousand years of religion and culture have been lost. Like millions of immigrant families, Lou and Polly Cowan pay for the prosperity with their pasts. When they die in a tragic fire, Paul begins a search for that part of his parents that had perished in America. The quest for an ancestral legacy by the American, Paul Cowan, becomes a rite of passage for the Jew who emerges Saul Cohen. Relatives like Jacob Cohen, the used cement bag dealer, and Modie Spiegel, Sr., the mail order magnate, come to life in the author's warm and touching recreation of an odyssey through immigrant America.
