Playing Detective with Family Lore: How plugging the holes in a family history unintentionally came to tell the saga of Jews in a microcosm

Playing Detective with Family Lore is more than one familys saga. The far-ranging origins of the authors family and the course of the progenitors lives and those of their descendants provide a microcosmic illustration of the macro-level triumphs and tragedies of Jewish life in Eastern Europe and America. From the tiny Radekhiv shtetl to the famous Polish market town Jaroslaw from the Russian port city Nikolayev - inside of the Pale of Settlement during the 1905 pogroms to Jassy - rife with unique antisemitic legislation following Romanian independence this book unwittingly traces a collective history epitomized by one particular familys combined narratives making it a must read for the 80% of American Jews who trace their ancestry back to Eastern Europe.Playing Detective with Family Lore goes beyond Researching Your Family History Online for Dummies. Offering more than a ringside seat how to mine information online the author a seasoned journalist shares her expertise with budding memoirists. She explores how the skills and the logic of a Sherlock Holmes can be employed to stitch together snippets of information in order to forge a more coherent whole that may confirm contest augment or complicate oral family lore.Not your run-of-the-mill memoir the structure is a tad unique. Sprinkled at the bottom of the pages academic footnotes are repurposed to create a new genre: Experiential Reading. The links to historical footage photos and short texts make reading this work closer to a virtual museum than a traditional e-book.