Lost in America: A Journey with My Father | 
 enlarge | Author: Sherwin B. Nuland
Publisher: Knopf
Category: Book
List Price: $24.00
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Rating:  20 reviews
Sales Rank: 523890
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1st
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 224
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 8.5 x 6 x 1
ISBN: 0375412948
Dewey Decimal Number: 974.7275004924
EAN: 9780375412943
ASIN: 0375412948
Publication Date: January 7, 2003
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Good condition, wear from reading and use. All pages are intact, and the cover is intact and has some creases. The spine has signs of wear and creases. This copy may include "From the library of" labels, stickers or stamps and be an ex-library copy.
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Product Description
He walks with me through every day of my life, in that unsteady, faltering gait that so embarrassed me when I was a boy. Always, he is holding fast to the upper part of my right arm . . . As we make our way together, my father I called him Daddy when I was small, because it sounded American and that is how he so desperately wanted things to seem is speaking in the idiosyncratic rhythms of a self-constructed English.
So Sherwin Nuland introduces Meyer Nudelman, his father, a man whose presence continues to haunt Nuland to this day. Meyer Nudelman came to America from Russia at the turn of the twentieth century, when he was nineteen. Pursuing the immigrant s dream of a better life but finding the opposite, he lived an endless round of frustration, despair, anger, and loss: overwhelmed by the premature deaths of his first son and wife; his oldest surviving son disabled by rheumatic fever in his teens; his youngest son, Sherwin, dutiful but defiant, caring for him as his life, beset by illness and fierce bitterness, wound to its unalterable end.
Lost in America, Nuland s harrowing and empathetic account of his father s life, is equally revealing about the author himself. We see what it cost him to admit the inextricable ties between father and son and to accept the burden of his father s legacy.
In Lost in America, Sherwin Nuland has written a memoir at once timeless and universal.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 15 more reviews...
 Beautiful book! August 19, 2008
This is the story of a father and a son and four other close family living in one small apartment in the Bronx. The lives of these Russian Jewish immigrants spanning the early to late 20th century. The story is razor blade truthful. It must have been very difficult to write but beautiful. The book begins with the quote by Philo of Alexandria "Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle". How true!
 Uggh December 12, 2007
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Trying to understand the multiple stars this book received by others.
An ungrateful son berates an immigrant father and in spite of his self-hating persona perseveres to become a physician. All ego, and lacking compassion, this is not my type of writer or physician.
Lost in America October 19, 2007
WHAT A GREAT AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL PIECE. I WAS ALMOST THERE WIN YOUNG SHERWIN AND FAMILY. HOW DIFFICULT IT AL MUST HAVE BEEN!
I LOVE NULAND'S BOOKS AND IF HE IS AS GOOD A SURGEON AS HE IS A WRITER I ENVY HIS PATIENTS. I would consult him any time
A powerful memoir June 3, 2007
This powerful and moving memoir tells the story of the childhood and growing- up years of the physician- author Sherwin Nuland. While the greatest emphasis is on the author's relation to his father, his relationships with other family members that shared the same household, his mother, his Bubbe, his Aunt Rose, his older brother are also described.
The book opens with Nuland's description of himself in total depression, and about to receive a lobotomy, when a young psychiatric student prevents this, and instead prescribes an alternate treatment. Nuland receives twenty shock treatments and they take him out of his depression.
He then by implication relates the depression to the story of his difficult childhood, and relation with his father. His father Max who worked as a tailor , was completely alone in America aside from his wife's family. He was a difficult suffering hypersensitive easily humiliated, easily outraged parent. Nuland tells the story of life in a home where his Bubbe and aunt did not speak with his father, and in which his beloved mother was the center until she passed away. Nuland tells of the years in which he accompanied his father,supported him as he limped along, and was ashamed of him. He quotes at length his father's Yiddishized English, a language which appears somehow grotesque and awkward without redeeming humor.
Nuland also tells in a most moving way of dramatic moments in the family's life. The day his father comes home broken and weeping, carrying with him a Jewish Forward account of how in his native city the entire population had been murdered, machine gunned to death by the Nazis.
Another moving tragic day is the day of Nuland's mother's death.
One beautiful moment is the one in which Nuland is told that he has been made Chief Surgical Resident at Yale Presbyterian. He races to his father's hospital bed and tells him the news. And he feels his father's sense of triumph and justification.The older immigrant generation, his father, his mother, his Bubbe, his aunt had lived for the 'hope' of what the younger generation might become in America. And Nuland's success as a doctor justifies the father's life to himself. The person who had always felt insulted, humiliated comes a short time before his death to feel that it all has been worthwhile.
This is once again a tremendously moving story. What I missed and what I have questions about are the other aspects of Nuland's life which are not written about. For instance it must have taken him an incredible amount of work and dedication to arrive at where he arrived in his studies. Nothing is said of that.
 And you thought YOUR parents were weird? June 28, 2006
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Dr. Nuland thought his immigrant father was simply weird or peculiar or just never adjusted to life in America until he was well into medical school, and diagnosed his father's tertiary syphilis by reading about it in a textbook. It explained everything, and in the tradition of the day, his father was never told the truth - not that anything could have been done. By the time he received treatment, his nervous system was already permanently damaged.
Interwoven are colorful stories of his own growing-up years (my personal favorite: learning the F word from older boys in the neighborhood), and the tragedy of his mother's death from cancer when he was 11. The type was never specified in the book; I had come to a conclusion that it was cervical or uterine cancer, and a Google search revealed that it was colon cancer. Either way, the results were the same. His father never remarried, but lived a platonic existence with two older female relatives (I read it a while back so don't recall the exact nature of their relation).
He kicks off the book with his own episode with mental illness and the resulting institutionalization which destroyed his first marriage. I first heard about that in a Book TV interview where I learned about this book as well. How much of this might have been precipitated by his childhood experiences is unknown.
It's a roller coaster ride of a story.
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