ABOUT THE BOOK

Playing Detective began as a promise to put together a modest memorial booklet briefly chronicling milestones in the life of a much-loved individual, the author’s father Gil Weiss. But two decades later it had taken on a life of its own.

First expanded in focus to weave together 67 years of family documents and odd memorabilia that Gil had saved, the manuscript was then enriched with excerpts from a decade of taped conversations with the author’s mother Pearl that were filled with insights about the quantum leap into the mainstream and middle-class life taken by her generation of Jews in America who were born to immigrant parents, and matured as ‘children of the Depression’. In a third metamorphosis, researching family roots to learn more about the lives of the four progenitors of the author’s family (including the reasons for their actions and the ramifications of their decisions) unexpectedly revealed a complex saga ranging from life in a tiny, poverty-stricken shtetl called Radekhiv in Galicia to life in the famous market town Jaroslaw in Poland, the Russian port city Nikolayev situated just inside the Pale of Settlement during the pogroms of 1905, and Jassy during two decades of unique antisemitic legislation that followed Romanian independence. Thus, the microcosm of a family saga, framed within the broader social, economic and political context by the author, was found to dovetail and mirror the triumphs and tragedies of two generations of Jews in Eastern Europe and America, making the book a ‘must read’, relevant for 80% of American Jews who trace their ancestry back to Eastern Europe.

Playing Detective goes beyond Researching Your Family History Online for Dummies. In recapping how family roots were unearthed, Ashkenazy offers readers a ringside seat how she was able to flesh-out the oral family narrative, at times literally ‘giving a life to the dead’, at times turning the narrative on its head. In the process, the author – a freelance journalist – shares the secrets (and the pitfalls) of Internet sleuthing and investigative journalism with budding family memoirists and archivists. The book goes beyond where to find fragments of information online, so central to most genealogical books. It shares how to see the significance in the subtext using the skills and the logic of a Sherlock Holmes to stitch such snippets together to forge a more coherent whole that may confirm or contest, augment or complexify oral family lore.

Not your run-of-the-mill memoir, this book’s structure is a tad unique. At the bottom of the pages, the author sprinkles piquant facts and personal insights alongside digressions and details that would encumber the flow of the main narrative – a tiered format of ‘two conversations’. In addition, Ashkenazy repurposes academic footnotes to create a new genre: Experiential Reading. A lifetime history buff, Ashkenazy beckons readers to take side excursions as they read. Only a click away, these fascinating places enable one to experience the narrative on another level through a peek at historical footage, vintage photos and little-known websites with eye-witness accounts, making reading this work closer to a virtual museum than a traditional eBook.

The ‘museum in the footnotes’ ranges from a link to the landmark 29-minute documentary about Ellis Island, Island of Hope – Island of Tears (1989), to voice clips where the reader can hear two types of Jewish music that reveal whether one’s Jewish ancestors were Hassidic in orientation or came from a somber Mitnagdim household. Or read primary sources, such as the firsthand account by the American consul-general Henry W. Diederich describing in 1903 how officials avoided pandemonium on the docks at Bremen over this or that family member being barred from boarding by shipping company doctors, and journalist Henry Author’s moving eyewitness account inside Ellis Island in 1901 – “Among the Immigrants”.