2nd Edition
My Father's Wars Migration, Memory, and the Violence of a Century
* Winner: International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry Outstanding Book Award 2016 *
“My father was born into war,” begins this remarkable saga in Alisse Waterston’s intimate ethnography, a story that is also twentieth-century social history. This is an anthropologist’s vivid account of her father’s journey across continents, countries, cultures, languages, generations—and wars. It is a daughter’s moving portrait of a charming, funny, wounded, and difficult man, his relationships with those he loved, and his most sacred of beliefs. And it is a scholar’s reflection on the dramatic forces of history, the experience of exile and immigration, the legacies of culture, and the enduring power of memory. This book is for Anthropology and Sociology courses in qualitative methods, ethnography, violence, migration, and ethnicity.
Prologue 1. The Shtetl Jedwabne – Sunrise, Sunset 2. Aftermaths – Delicate Memories 3. The Voyage Out – Routes 4. The Shopkeepers – Return 5. Young Man in Havana – The Power of Privilege 6. An American Soldier – The Lost Ones 7. In Love and War – Postwar 8. American Dreams/Dreaming in Cuban – Habitus 9. Dictators – The End of Empires 10. Cigarettes, Babies, and Change – Possession and Dispossession 11. Things Fall Apart – The Sacred and the Secular 12. Te Amamos Siempre, Paisano – The Story of My Story Epilogue Afterword: Out of the Shadows and Into the Present
Biography
Alisse Waterston is Presidential Scholar and Professor, Department of Anthropology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York, and author or editor of seven books including the graphic novel, Light in Dark Times: The Human Search for Meaning (illustrated by Charlotte Corden). A Long-Term Fellow of the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Studies (SCAS) in the Programmes in Transnational Processes, Structural Violence, and Inequality (2020-present), she served as President of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) in 2015-17. She is editor of the book series, Intimate Ethnography for Berghahn Books. Professor Waterston is author of two ethnographies on urban poverty in the US (Love, Sorrow and Rage: Destitute Women in a Manhattan Residence and Street Addicts in the Political Economy), and of the edited volumes, An Anthropology of War: Views from the Frontline and Anthropology off the Shelf: Anthropologists on Writing (co-edited with Maria D. Vesperi).
Praise for My Father's Wars:
The “intimate ethnography” of the author’s loving but difficult father — a Polish, Cuban, Puerto Rican, American, Jewish patriarch — with a sparkling new Afterword, recenters the story on her equally fascinating mother. Placing the ethnography of a “common” yet quite extraordinary man in the context of the violent physical and emotional dislocation of war and nationalism, and the feminist cultural transformations of the last century, the often poignant narrative invites readers to engage with the resonant dialectic between remembered and imagined pasts as they shape lives into the present.
Daniel J. Walkowitz, author of The Remembered and Forgotten Jewish World: Jewish Heritage in Europe and the United States
My Father’s Wars is now a classic. This gorgeously written founding work of “intimate ethnography” bridges family narrative and anthropological understanding. It brings a penetrating analytical eye and honest open heart to an exploration of how “ordinary” individuals like Waterston's father emerge out of the maelstroms of both family and world histories and shapes those histories in turn. Innovative in its style and multimodal format, this extraordinary book epitomizes the mission of anthropology at its very best – teaching us what it is to be human.
Christine J. Walley, author of Exit Zero: Family and Class in Postindustrial Chicago
Alisse Waterston employs the considerable power of narrative—a daughter's intimate but thoroughly anthropological account of her father's fascinatingly troubled life, skillfully situating her family's story into the cross currents of 20th-century history. This beautifully written book compels readers to think, feel and act.
Paul Stoller, author of Wisdom from the Edge: Writing Ethnography in Turbulent Times
An utterly fascinating, touching, informative, and beautifully crafted ‘intimate ethnography.’ Historical, personal, and anthropological, it crosses genres and disciplines. I love this book.
Fran Mascia-Lees, author of Gender and Difference in a Globalizing World: Twenty-First Century Anthropology
Waterston’s intimate ethnography begins with a writer’s question: how can you tell your father’s story if you are a daughter who is also an anthropologist? My Father’s Wars is an extraordinary account of a man ‘born into war,’ that begins in Jedwabne, Poland, a man whose memories can bring him—and the reader—to tears.
Nancy K. Miller, author of What They Saved: Pieces of a Jewish Past
Gripping and unforgettable. Today we need Waterston’s startling insights more urgently than ever.
Ellen Cassedy, author of We Are Here: Memories of the Lithuanian Holocaust
This is a remarkable work that may well become an anthropological classic. The combination of honesty, vulnerability, and deep scholarship expressed in supremely readable prose is rare. Waterston has obviously carried out a great deal of research, but she wears her knowledge lightly, using it to understand rather than impress.
Joan Cassell, author of The Woman in the Surgeon’s Body
Not every father is blessed with an ethnographer for a daughter—and not every ethnographer has a father with such an extraordinary story and memory. The intimate ethnography arising from that relationship is nothing short of exceptional. Experimental and hybrid, this ethnography exemplifies what anthropologist Barbara Meyerhoff calls the ‘third voice,’ something new that arises ‘when two points of view are engaged in examining one life.’ That life, lived in times of war and trauma, a Jewish life lived in Poland, is given new life in this innovative ethnography.
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, co-author with her father, Mayer Kirshenblatt, of They Called Me Mayer July: Painted Memories of a Jewish Childhood in Poland Before the Holocaust
Waterston deals with social issues that are so big, so huge, and so intimidating that it is hard to imagine most of us wanting to take them on: genocide and war and flight across some of the most defining landscapes of the 20th century. And she does so in a way that is simultaneously forceful and yet enticing in drawing us into the story of her father’s tumultuous life. Her book speaks to the ways in which we can and must continue to challenge assumptions about the intransigence and durability of bigotry, whether it be anti-Semitism, racism, Islamophobia, or any other prejudice. This is a book with a heart.
Susan Hyatt, author of The Neighborhood of Saturdays: Memories of a Multi-Ethnic Community on Indianapolis’ Southside
Compelling, and readable. When confronted with violence, most of us want to turn away, to shield our eyes and our minds from horrific events. Waterston reminds us that even if we want to look away, we must not, we need to understand.
Brenda Murphy, novelist and blogger Writing While Distracted
My Father’s Wars is a story about the importance of the relationship between micro-history and the fluidity of historical particularisms, between the relations of matrixes of power and reflections on anthropo-cultural systems of the higher kind. This work is also a chronicle of remembrance – a link between micro- and macro-history, a deep intersection at whose center resides trauma. In the title of the work, in plural form, we read: wars. How many? It is not just about the literal counting of a father’s lived experience(s). Wars are also about the deep, ontological moment of the constant warfare of the personality within the self, of a human life intersecting with the external factual reality colored with the issues of war, migration, antisemitism and many [geno]cides in the century of violence. Our century of violence. And, again: our centuries of violence. And life. That is why My Father’s Wars are our wars. That is why we should read Alisse Waterston’s My Father’s Wars.
Sofia Grandakovska, author and editor of The Jews from Macedonia and the Holocaust: History, Theory, Culture.
Waterston’s book makes a landmark contribution, and My Father’s Wars seems destined to become a classic. It portrays the dramatic story of the author’s father as he collides with world events, avoiding as best he can the shifting tectonic plates caused by forces beyond his control. Waterston has shown us a way of doing the hard work required to conduct intimate ethnography, and demonstrates how to write it, illustrating how to tell a personal story with compassion, but without sentimentality, sculpting malleable memory around the hard facts of political, economic, and social history.
Jerome M. Levi, professor emeritus, Carleton College
Although Waterston’s study takes as its primary focus her “father’s wars,” the book ends with her mother’s peaceful death after she had carved out a new life. The role of Waterston’s mother as supporting character in this narrative raises questions about the continuing hold of “patriographies.” What might a text that foregrounded the struggles of Waterston’s mother have looked like?
Pam Ballinger, author of The World Refugees Made: Decolonization and the Foundation of Postwar Italy
A beautifully written book that brilliantly weaves the emotional intensity of familial relationships through a torrid 20th century history. The unique trajectory of a family’s migration sets the stage for a gripping story that accentuates personal travails amidst the damaged grandeur of 20th century white masculinity.
Tim Black, author of When A Heart Turns Rock Solid
This deeply moving “intimate ethnography” is a remarkable achievement, informing in vivid detail about the at once triumphant and most tragic life of the author’s father, whom, despite a chasm of ideological differences, she understands and portrays with warm empathy.
Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, author of Flowers that Kill
Waterston’s narrative carries the weight and up close confidence of a personal biography, yet is persistent in informing the reader to cast a wider net. With the skill of an adept social scientist, she respectfully allows that history and interpretation to be told, and honors its necessity as a reconstructive device for our uprooted and displaced forefathers, accommodating the stories and memories of which, to an extent, our own lives are based. At the same time, she makes us aware of the causes, urgency, stark realities and momentous sociopolitical upheaval that her subject is, in fact, responding to: war, exile, revolution and dispossession—where much of the story of the twentieth century is in fact written.
Albert Sgambati, author of The Waiting Room
