Lost in America: A Journey with My Father by Sherwin B. Nuland Publisher: Knopf A Review, by Christopher Mahon copyright 2003 All Rights Reserved

I knew I was going to like Sherwin B. Nuland’s new memoir, Lost in America: A Journey with My Father, as soon as I read the book’s epigraph.

"Be kind," the epigraph began, "for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle."

Nuland attributes the quote to Philo of Alexandria.

The epigraph is a kind of call to peaceful arms; a petition to all who read it to relate to the many around them with kindness, with understanding, amidst the silent battles that surround us on the highways, in the shopping malls, in the living rooms or hospitals of our lives. The great battle is fought by everyone but, for the purposes of this book, it is fought mostly by two: father and son, Meyer Nudelman and Sherwin Nuland.

We learn more of one of these battles early on in the book, in the first paragraph of the first chapter, which reads:

I have never read a single textbook paragraph on the subject of depression. I have never looked at a sentence written in later tranquility by a recovered sufferer. I do not need to learn about depression from the pages of a book. I have had my own.

Dr. Nuland, a graduate of Yale Medical School, a clinical professor of surgery at Yale, a 1994 National Book Award winner for his How We Die: Reflections on Life’s Final Chapter, reveals to us that he has been laid low, that he has suffered the deep, mind-shattering torments of a depression so severe that they forced him to seek refuge in a mental hospital for over a year about thirty years ago. That particular storm has long since passed, but he reveals the force of it early on in the way a teaching professor of medicine might reveal a diseased tissue to a medical student: to instruct, mostly, to illuminate.

In recalling his own battle with severe depression, Dr. Nuland talks about the trickery of memory, the looming presence of his father through all of his years, and hints at the relationship between his father’s struggles and his own. But the book is not about depression. The early mentioning of depression, like the early mentioning of kindness, is used mostly to set the tone, to frame the story, to provide a kind of emotional theater in which the events narrated in the book can unfold.

Sherwin Nuland’s father arrived alone in America in 1907. He came from the town of Novoselitz in Bassarabia, which is in the southern region of Russia. He established connections with two uncles, settled in the South Bronx of New York City, failed at some early business attempts, such as the ownership of a candy store, and eventually toiled for years in New York’s garment industry. He married and raised two sons. He never really assimilated himself into the majority culture. He never, in fact, mastered the English language. He spoke in Yiddish or in a wounded English that Dr. Nuland rather masterfully represents in his own text (vosh you doidy fayste for "wash your dirty face; Tschikahgy for Chicago; Sen Frensooskie for San Francisco), and was an outsider even in the outsider Jewish immigrant community. He suffered from an embarrassing and debilitating neurological disease that forced him to rely on others simply to walk down the street, that left him with a permanent lack of control over his own bladder. He was, as Dr. Nuland explains, "lost in America." He never found his way.

But he was a great man, nevertheless.

He wasn’t great in the way we normally think of greatness. He was not a conqueror, or a great artist or inventor. He did not contribute something of his own (except his sons) to society at large that will always be remembered in history. He was not great in this usual sense of the word. Meyer Nudelman was great in the depth and breadth of his sorrow, great in the suffering and humiliation he encountered through life, great in the sheer lostness he experienced. Great, finally, in the influence he had on, and the love he held for, his son.

And Dr. Nuland has written a great memoir of their journey together.

Last month I wrote about why we need memoirs.

They can be genuine, I said. They can battle against the artificiality of a world filled with automobiles, television sets, and shopping malls. Memoirs can teach us about what it truly means to be an American. "Let us write our memoirs," I said, " ... let us tell the world in a thousand different ways that we are just like everyone else."

This book is about real emotions, real places, real events, real struggles, real interactions between and among people. It speaks about near death experiences by electrical sockets, diphtheria, the near death of a child by choking on fish bones, the Interborough Rapid Transit line that divides the East and West Bronx, street games and paternal calls home, the Shabbos meal on Friday evenings, the benediction of generous cousins, the imprisonment of father-son relations, the legacy of Nazi slaughters, and the abandonment of one name, "Nudelman," for another, "Nuland."

But this list is a pale approximation of its role in the sweeping, two-hundred page narrative of the memoir — because all of the items on that list, in their telling, are infused with the meaning of the journey, with the emotions between father and son, with the ironic, if not tragic, truth that while, even from an early age, the son continually made his way into the light, despite — or perhaps because of —so many obstacles, even while the son ascended to the heights of American professional success (not only a doctor but a surgeon! not only medical school, but Yale!) the father remained perpetually lost on Morris Avenue, in the South Bronx, even as his anger gave way to tenderness, even as his disappointment in the country he came to with so many hopes gave way to an open- (if sometimes weak) hearted welcoming to what it could offer to his son.

And for all the many characteristics that may mark the Nudelman family as separate from my own (and perhaps yours, too) — the Jewish heritage and immigrant experience, the South Bronx upbringing, the extended family in cramped apartment quarters — and for all the differences between Dr. Nuland and myself — the medical profession, the difference in years, the cultural galaxies between us — I recognized myself and my family in his book.

There was a magic about being with Momma," he writes. "The magic was at its greatest when we were together and safe — when no harshment was invading the encirclement of blessedness in which I imagined her to move. Momma was the totality of all I knew to be good, and I was certain that she lived only to be my mother. She was to be shared with no one. Whatever others might require of her was only a transient distraction until she could return to me, a little boy certain that he was her reason for being.

That’s my mother he’s writing about.

"Like all mothers," Nuland continues (his mother died one week after his eleventh birthday), "mine was beautiful."

Nuland’s father was more complicated.

His life seemed full of small failures and perceived slights. In spite of every one of his inherent disabilities, though, I somehow knew, with that unerring sense that growing children have, that he loved me, that he obviously cared deeply about me. But his expressions of it were strange, and they made me feel strange, too.

But again, that’s my father he’s writing about. (My father once told me that his epitaph should be: He loved funny.)

Volcanic in temper, Nuland continues later on in the book, describing his father, and terrifying in his autocratic control, he had always seemed to me to maintain his authority by the explosive force of his unpredictable and predictable anger rather than through any wisdom he possessed or respect he had earned.

That’s my father again.

He was tired, dispirited, and only too aware of the buffeting that with every difficult year increasingly robbed him of his small remaining store of pride.

And again.

There’s a reconciliation of sorts, at the end of the tale, a triumph, between father and son, when Nuland succeeds in the medical field. Nudelman eventually finds a permanent peace. But the real reconciliation for Nuland doesn’t take place until years later, when he writes this book. He sought an understanding that goes beyond freedom and it’s evident he’s found it in the writing, though the journey — the journey to find his way in America, to find his father’s way for him — continues.

As will, probably, the appreciation of the book itself.

There’s more to discuss: Nuland’s experience with girls as a young man; family dynamics with an aunt who lives in the house; a caring cousin of Nuland’s father, who is a doctor; and Nuland’s own journey into medicine.

For now, though, I’d simply like to call attention to the book’s literary style.

If prose is a land-bound animal and poetry a bird in flight, Dr. Nuland’s uncannily consistent writing style somehow combines both and creates a language that has a lot of gravity but still flies inches, or a few feet, off the ground through the course of the book. There are no spectacular flights of fancy but the language always defies what can sometimes be the deadly gravity of prose.

Yeats had a line: "Because I have come into my strength/And words obey my call."

Words obey Dr. Nuland’s call. I hesitate to use a medical analogy, to say that Dr. Nuland calls for words in the way a surgeon calls for his surgical instruments, always using the right tool for the job at hand, but that seems to me to be how his words function.

For Dr. Nuland to describe his father teaching his son to shave in a passage that includes a phrase like "managing with his usual maladroitness" or in the same passage to speak of "the thick horsehair brush that completed the depilatory armamentarium" or, in a later passage, to describe one of his own many jobs, as he was growing up, as "one of those green-uniformed navvies who spear trash on the grass strips alongside highways" just seems to be Dr. Nuland’s way of having fun in the midst of a mostly serious enterprise.

Of his father, he can also write, ... I would wonder how long his body could continue to resist the consecutive assaults being made on it. ... His heart and blood pressure were normal, there was no evidence of malignancy, and his young doctors said that he could go on like this for years and years. It was during this time that I began to wish he would die.

This kind of honesty does not seem unkind for a man who is trying to understand the terrible hold a father has had over him for a lifetime. Rather, it is more like an act of humility: a respectful approach to the truth, and to the man — his father — who personifies that truth. Meyer Nudelman inhabited the role of father as destroyer who, paradoxically, made all things possible. For Nuland, in his writing, love, understanding, forgiveness, and a clear-sighted literary investigation absolve all contradictions.

So, beyond the writing talent, Dr. Nuland brings a certain philosophy — or, perhaps, ethical system — to the writing of the memoir. The ethics, in fact, may arise from the work, from the language that creates it. Dr. Nuland’s literary ethics include kindness. They include understanding. They hold that the search for truth, which in itself may be elusive, can be redemptive. This philosophy of kindness and understanding invisibly permeates every sound in the book’s silent language, as you read the words on the page, and it respects just about everything else: human frailty; the long, lonely journey through life; the riches granted to those who succeed in the American dream; the deprivations experienced by those who do not; the great gap between those two points; and the miraculous if sometimes heartbreaking communion that can also occur within them, within two generations, within the same family, between father and son.

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