title: Forgetting Fathers: Untold Stories from an Orphaned Past (Excelsior Editions)
author: David Marshall
description: One of our most gifted literary scholars, David Marshall in <i>Forgetting Fathers</i> has written an <i>un</i>-forgettable detective story born in a deeply felt, personal quest to solve the mystery of his grandfathers name. The result is not only an absorbing read; it is a profound testament to the human impulse to know who we are and from whence we came. For Marshall, that secret was locked a century ago in the Hebrew Orphan Asylum of the City of New York, and in his odyssey to findand turnthe key, Marshall becomes the living proof of Eudora Weltys timeless line, Remembering is done through the blood.  Henry Louis Gates Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, Harvard University<br /><br /><i>Forgetting Fathers</i> is a truly remarkable piece of work. The pertinacity of Marshall as a reader, as a critic, as a theorist, impels him on his quest to learn all that he can about his past. The book is riveting.  Jonathan Freedman, coeditor of <i>Jewish in America</i><br /><br />From the Hebrew Orphan Asylum to the history of New York tailors, David Marshall weaves his Jewish family memoir with gripping details. An enlightening contribution to the growing body of research on the lives and institutions of twentieth-century Jewish immigrants.  Mikhal Dekel, author of <i>The Universal Jew: Masculinity, Modernity, and the Zionist Moment</i>
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  Autobiography of Malcom X
  
  
  Behold, America. Just when our country's cultural evolution appears to have
  the man who
  
  
  was the author of the internationally acclaimed _Roots_ passed away suddenly
  in the middle
  
  
  of the night. Alex Haley and I had discussed the possibility of my writing his
  
  
  autobiography to acknowledge our literary circle, our family of writers-my
  father to him
  
  
  and him to me.
  
  
  Six years have passed since I received this initial request to prepare a new
  foreword for
  
  
  my father's life story. My godfather's wish was that I commemorate my father's
  life by
  
  
  writing about some of the significant events that have served as a postscript
  for his
  
  
  extraordinary life story, but to do this it is essential to begin with the
  legacy that my
  
  
  father himself was heir to from the beginning.
  
  
  In 1919, my paternal grandparents, Earl and Louisa Little, married and began
  their large
  
  
  family of eight children. At the same time they both work