My Father's People: A Family of Southern Jews. By Louis D. Rubin Jr. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Press, 2002. 139 pages. $22.50.

Throughout his academic and literary career, Louis D. Rubin Jr. has spent much of his time exploring the South. With over 50 books to his credit, Rubin has enabled students, writers, and interested readers to explore, experience, and be enveloped by Southern literature and culture. His newest effort, My Father’s People is more personal yet employs the same graceful and concise prose that Rubin’s admirers have come to expect. In his new book, categorized as a family memoir, Rubin accomplishes much more than merely relating the story of his family’s immigration and acculturation experiences from Russia to Charleston, South Carolina, during the late 19th and 20th centuries.

Though he is a descendant of a family of four brothers and three sisters, Rubin tells the story of his father and three uncles whose life experiences, according to the author, were fundamentally shaped by a prolonged separation from their parents. Because of financial crises and illness, three of the boys were sent to the Hebrew Orphan’s Home in Atlanta for a number of years. Rubin’s narrative is a story of attempts by boys, and later men, to overcome childhood abandonment and succeed in the larger American society.

More importantly, Rubin argues this is a distinctly Southern story where three men struggled to acculturate into a racially charged and class-stratified South while still retaining their own individualism and, in some cases, their Judaism. Some succeed more than others. Eldest is Harry, who constructed his whole identity around an ideal of white, male, conservative, and Southern respectability. He was not in the orphanage but was forever changed by that experience and positioned himself as the family patriarch. Next is Dan, a Broadway playwright and a Hollywood screenwriter who attempted to stay true to the crafting and staging of human experience despite temptations of wealth and an eventual loss of skill, and whose own perceived failure prevented his return home until his funeral. Third was Manning, a distant and somber man, a self- conscious Jew, fiction writer, and magazine editor for the Evening Post. Finally, Rubin’s father, Louis, was a successful electrician felled by illness who later became a nationally known weather prognosticator.

There are many fascinating stories within the individual sketches, but Rubin’s analysis moves beyond the traditional ethnic family narrative and is an important breakthrough for the genre of family history. First, it is an honest and respectful family memoir, not a lionization of immigrant and first generation experiences. Through Rubin’s words, we experience these men as real people—not heroic archetypes—struggling with acculturation, financial problems, societal expectations, parental pressures, personal goals, interpersonal struggles, religious imperatives, their masculinity, their egos, business successes and failures, illnesses, and aging.

Additionally, Rubin admits to the difficulties in cultivating these narratives through interviews and a lack of family evidence, common in eastern European migration stories. Either because of memory lapses or a reticence to recall painful or embarrassing memories by interviewed family members, there are many silences in this family history. Rubin respects these silences and resists the all-too-frequent impulse of imposing an authoritative voice to fill in the gaps.

Finally, Rubin contributes to the field of American Jewish history as he strays from traditional immigrant and first-generation narratives that either privilege complete Jewish fidelity or total assimilation. Rubin’s father and uncles, each in his own way, related to their Judaism differently, thereby testifying to the growing historical notion that Jews in the South crafted individual and distinctive Jewish identities modified by the Southern space and time.

The only disappointment within Rubin’s work is that he did not spend more time analyzing the experiences of his aunts. Dora, a clerical worker and a devout Jew, receives her own chapter. There were also two younger sisters, Esther and Ruthie, who receive barely a mention in the study. It would have been interesting for Rubin to include the sisters in his comparative analysis. Applying gender to his study would surely have enriched our understanding of the effects of immigration and acculturation on the family and individual experience. Even through Rubin’s brief description of his aunts, it is clear that their experiences, like those of their brothers, stray from traditional understandings of the female immigrant and first generation experiences.

Despite this, Rubin’s work is a significant contribution to the field of family memoirs. Rubin’s short volume demonstrates the importance of recognizing that immigrant and first generation experiences were complex and contradictory and encourages scholars to investigate nuances rather than searching for all-encompassing and conformist narratives. Finally, My Father’s People would also be useful to people interested in ethnic, immigration, Southern, gender, and Jewish studies.

Jennifer A. Stollman