All during his growing-up years and well into his adulthood Sherwin Nuland tried his utmost to get out from under his father. Even in his 70s, however, when writing a memoir, Nuland has not entirely resolved his problems with this parent. As he says: “I am writing this book to help me come to terms with my father. I am writing this book to finally make peace with him, and perhaps with myself.”

The book is entitled “Lost in America: A Journey With My Father” and ranks among the most compelling memoirs I have ever read. Its portrait of a Jewish immigrant family in the Bronx during the early and middle years of the 20th century fascinated me throughout, with the agonizing relationship of father and son at the heart of the story.

As a person given in later life to frequent reflection on my problematic relationship with my own father, almost 50 years after his death, I strongly identify with Nuland’s account of his struggles with his father.

His father’s name was Meyer Nudelman, as he was known when he first came to New York from Russia in 1907. At age 16, Sherwin changed his own last name to Nuland, largely in an effort to ease assimilation to Gentile society. On this occasion, ironically, his father also wanted to adopt the name Nuland, an action that would have defeated part of Sherwin’s reason for changing. Only vigorous protests from Sherwin and his older brother Harvey staved off their father’s action.

The small South Bronx apartment which the family occupied resounded to the words and phrases of the Yiddish language. Only the two boys learned to read, write, and speak English. The others – Meyer and the boys’ mother Vitsche, their maternal grandmother whom they called Bubbeh, and their aunt Rose – in effect remained inhabitants of the old world in Russia. Even though Meyer went to work every day in the garment district, he spoke a brand of English that was his own, mixed in with often bizarre dollops of Yiddish words and idioms.

Sherwin, called Sheppy in the family, was only 11 when his mother died, a crushing event for the boy and one that left him more than ever under his father’s influence.

Normally theirs was a turbulent family atmosphere. Even in religious practice, there was tension. When Meyer presided at the Sabbath and holy day rituals, he would rush through the rites at what the son remembers as “express-train speed.” He could discover precious little spiritual content in his father’s observance.

His grandmother, or Bubbeh, on the other hand, practiced a religion of some depth. Her relationship with God was personal and familiar, so that “she often addressed Him in the diminutive, as did other shetl women of her generation. He was Gotenyu, ‘my adored Goddy,’ as though she were speaking directly to one of her beloved grandchildren.”

Sherwin Nuland does not now believe in God, he reveals. In later life he sees the legacy of his family’s religion as negative. “It has been for me like the song of the Lorelei,” he writes,  “trying to lure me back to the destructive reefs of obsessional thinking, guilt, and depression. This is the heritage I have carried, the legacy of the formalized religion of my father, and no doubt also of the superstition of my Bubbeh.”

Despite what he describes as an agonizing struggle to become free of his father, Nuland’s life story leads to successes that make his father feel proud and fulfilled. After doing well as an undergraduate at NYU, he was admitted to Yale Medical School, his expenses paid by a family friend, possibly a cousin. On the young doctor’s graduation, his father’s face shone with pleasure and the son for the moment was able not to feel embarrassment at his presence.

Sherwin Nuland’s next professional success was being chosen as chief resident in surgery at the Yale hospital, only the second Jewish person to be so selected. When he broke this news to his father, the latter’s feelings went beyond words. “My triumph,” Dr. Nuland writes, “was his reward for all the bitterness he had suffered over the years, for the hours of despair and for enduring in the face of sickness, pessimism, and even death .  .  .  This news of mine was testimony that he had not failed in America. It was his affirmation as a man.”

The effects of the author’s long struggle to come to terms with his paternal heritage remain with him. A severe bout with depression ultimately resolved by shock treatments witnesses to the continuing impact on him of his inner torment.

And yet, he concludes his memoir by saying this about his father: “In seeking to escape him, I have drawn closer, and now at last I know that the closeness can be good. I have been trying to find his way in America for him, and for me. There is no end to it.”

Richard Griffin