The New Book and the Old Book

My new book, My Father’s ALS: A Son’s Healing Journey, is a huge contrast with my previous book published 31 years ago. The new book is about my family of birth: my father Sam, my mother Ann, my brothers Mark and Bob, and me. It tells the story of the agonizing 15 months of my father’s life with ALS. And it is my own story of growing up at 36 as I encountered the end of my father’s life.

I always believed that a world of eager readers awaited publication of my previous book. It told the very public story of the Petaluma Jewish chicken ranching community over three generations, from the immigrant settlers, their American-born children, and then the baby boomer grandchildren, my generation. Through one extraordinary small Jewish community, an agrarian chicken ranching community, this was the epic tale of Eastern European Jewish immigration and assimilation over generations in twentieth century America: Comrades and Chicken Ranchers, the Story of a California Jewish Community (Cornell University Press 1993).

The new book, My Father’s ALS, tells a private story of one family, my own family, facing an unimaginable domestic crisis: the life and death of my father Sam, with the dread disease ALS. It is a grim account of the relentless breakdown of a body, and a life, and of a family struggling to help him over the 15 terrible months following diagnosis.

This new book tells how my father and I overcame a long history of estrangement to encounter ALS. Together Dad and I searched for medical support to fight the disease, we placed his business affairs in final order, I listened to my father recount his own life history and how to remember him, and I joined his mourning for his coming death. Finally, unthinkably, when he wanted to end his life, my father, a paraplegic from ALS, turned to me for how. Without discussing it, and almost without knowing it, we crossed the old chasm that had long divided us.

Writing My Father’s ALS I discovered that no stories are larger: Sam’s life and death among the Greatest Generation, and his Baby Boomer son become a man.