Excellent family saga. ( )

Family sagas, both fiction and non, are among my favorite genres. This one has three unique branches: the Kaganoviches, a Jewish family from the Pale of Settlement, sends brave emigrants to Palestine and to NYC, leaving the doomed group to be murdered by Nazis and their Lithuanian accomplices. The author gives equal weight and time to each story, and they are pretty remarkable: the Palestinians are pioneers, but complicit in the destruction of Bedouin and Arab villages; the Americans launch the Maidenform Bra Company but don't do much to heed the desperate calls from the old country, and the dead speak only through diaries of the few neighbors who survivored the Holocaust.

In another response to the ever-puzzling "Why did the Jews put up so little resistance?", there's a fascinating and new-to-me chapter on the expectations of the Kaganoviches living in Volozhin, who'd been through a German invasion back in 1918 and were not treated any worse by those invaders than they were by the Russian/Polish/Romanian Christians who constantly conducted progroms.

Well-written and researched, the "Notes" section alone is riveting. Highly recommended. ( )

With cinematic power and beauty, bestselling author David Laskin brings to life the upheavals of the twentieth century through the story of one family, three continents, two world wars, and the rise and fall of nations.

Laskin looks at 20c through its effects on one family (his) who begin in Russia (in the Pale on the Russia-Poland border) but go off in three directions: to US (NYC where they go from penniless immigrants to successful entrepreneurs, including one member who founds Maiden Form bras), Holy Land (as Zionists) , and a few who remain in their homeland (I haven't gotten to this part) and get swept into Holocaust from German occupation. The names are hard as there are multiple Chaim's in different generations or branches and many of the original names are changed once in US to Americanized ones (Herschel becomes Harry etc). The historical sweep as well as the unfolding of Jewish history in 20c is really informative (ESP for the likes of me). ( )

The premise of The Family, by David Laskin, sounds like the proverbial genealogical myth - "There were three branches of the family, one stayed in Poland, one went to the United States, and the third went to Isreal." However, I quickly realized that Laskin was using his vast trove of family letters, and researching and storytelling skills to tell the compelling story of a large Jewish family caught up in the major themes of the early 20th century; capitalism, fascism, mass migration, and assimilation. At times it is a difficult story to read as he has given faces and personalities to the victims of anti-semitism in the repeated pogroms and the holocaust. I came away from the book with a deeper feeling for the strength of this particular extended family with all their heartbreaks and triumphs.