Sometimes we must look into the past in
order to face the future.
After growing up as a fully assimilated
Jew, Paul Cowan embarked in his mid-thirties upon a journey to
discover and appreciate his true identity and heritage. This
“orphan in history” relates his search for these
roots, detailing the path he took from his Park Avenue home to
nineteenth-century Lithuania to a contemporary Israeli kibbutz,
leading to remarkable personal discoveries that will move
everyone who has yearned to know more about their past.
An Orphan in History is a classically beautiful, inspiring story of
how one man evolved from describing himself as “an
American Jew” to “an American and a Jew.”
This story will inspire you to journey in
search of your true self.
“A deeply moving and very
well-written account of a personal twentieth-century
odyssey.”
—Chaim
Potok
“More than the story of a life; it
is the story of an experience…. At a time when many are
seeking answers in all sorts of paths—religious, mystical
and political—Paul Cowan managed to find them, and
himself, in his own history.”
—Richard
F. Shepard, New York Times
“Beautiful and moving…. An Orphan in History will
interest hyphenated Americans of every variety.”
—Charles
Silberman, New York Times Book Review
“The rest of us have caught up with
Cowan. More than ever we need his provocative story of the
tension between the desire to be an American and the compulsion
to be a Jew.”
—Lee
Meyerhoff Hendler, author of The Year Mom Got Religion:
One Woman’s
Midlife Journey into Judaism
“Searching outward and looking
inward at the same time, Cowan has produced a work of
remarkable honesty and clarity.”
—Jewish
Book World
“It has added to the literature of
religious and ethnic renewal in a highly personal and moving
way.”
—Los
Angeles Times
Paul Cowan was
an inspiring author of several books, including The Tribes of America, The Making of an
Un-American, and, with his wife,
Rachel Cowan, Mixed Blessings. He died in 1988 of complications from leukemia. Rachel Cowan wrote
the Afterword for the paperback edition of An Orphan in History (originally
published by Doubleday).
