Description
Book SynopsisA Man Comes from Someplace is a story of a lost world, a story in history of a multi-generational Jewish family from a shtetl in Ukraine before WWI. As cultural study, the narrative draws upon the oral stories of the author’s father, family letters, eyewitness accounts, immigration papers, etc., and cultural research. The narrative becomes a transformative space to re-present story as performance, a meta-narrative, and an auto-ethnography for the author to reflect upon the effects of the stories on her own life, as daughter of a survivor, and as teacher/scholar. Summerfield raises questions about immigration, survival, resilience, place and identity, how story functions as antidote to trauma, a means of making sense of the world, and as resistance, the refusal to be silenced or erased, the insistence we know the past and remember those who came before. In 2011, she found her way back to the place her family came from in Ukraine. The book is now being read by students in their ESL classes in Novokoonstantinov, Ukraine.
Table of ContentsForeword: Finding Our Papers by Shirley R. Steinberg xiii Acknowledgments xv Prologue: Ukraine 2011 xix Introduction: So, Here's the Story xxi 1 Time and Place 1 2 Family 11 3 End of a World 33 4 Going to America 59 5 A Brother's Keeper 77 6 A Man without Papers 91 7 Immigrant Life 109 8 Finding a Place 123 9 Holding onto the Past 143 10 Return to the Old Country 155 11 The Place Itself 173 12 Stories to Grow on 203 Afterword: A Storyteller Comes from Someplace 221 Index 267
