My Mother’s Books: Symbols of Resistance

Among the many old books on my shelves are a couple of dozen especially battered ones. Some belong to my father’s collection (I will write on these on another occasion); some belong to my uncle’s. And then there are another two, especially fragile, their pages browned and brittle, also brought back from India, just likeContinue reading “My Mother’s Books: Symbols of Resistance”

Children and Nostalgia

I often find myself talking or writing about nostalgia. As I said here a little while ago: I’m an immigrant; nostalgia and homesickness are supposed to be my perennial conditions. In that same post, I remarked too, on the particular manifestations of both kinds of nostalgia–restorative, which concerns itself with returning to the lost home and reflective,Continue reading “Children and Nostalgia”

The Genealogy of Moi

In reviewing Francois Weil‘s Family Trees: A History of Geneaology in America (‘In Quest of Blood Lines‘, New York Review of Books, 23 May 2013) Gordon S. Wood, after tracking an older American obsession with family lineage, possibly noble birth and associated family fortune, notes an interesting statistic: By 2005, a poll found that 73 percentContinue reading “The Genealogy of Moi”