Book Club

In tracing the roots of this family—his own family—Laskin captures the epic sweep of the twentieth century. A modern-day scribe, Laskin honors the traditions, the lives, and the choices of his ancestors: revolutionaries and entrepreneurs, scholars and farmers, tycoons and truck drivers. The Family is a deeply personal, dramatic, and emotional account of people caught in a cataclysmic time in world history.

A century and a half ago, a Torah scribe and his wife raised six children in a yeshivatown at the western fringe of the Russian empire. Bound by their customs and ancient faith, the pious couple expected their sons and daughter to carry family traditions into future generations. But the social and political crises of our time decreed otherwise.

David Laskin's family on his mother's side began in the shtetel of Rakov and the yeshiva center of Volozhin, both in current-day Belarus. Their family name was Kagan or Kaganovich, which is a derivative of the priestly name of "Cohen". Many of the men were scholars and torah scribes and the women either kept the house or made the coin. Hard times in then-Russia - pogroms and government suppression and economic failures - made the idea of emigrating to "der Goldene Medina" - the United States - a very attractive one.

The torrent of history took the scribe’s family down three very different roads. One branch immigrated to America and founded the fabulously successful Maidenform Bra Company; another went to Palestine as pioneers and participated in the contentious birth of the state of Israel; the third branch remained in Europe and suffered the onslaught of the Nazi occupation.

With cinematic power and beauty, bestselling author David Laskin brings to life the upheavals of the twentieth century through the story of one family, three continents, two world wars, and the rise and fall of nations.

Born in Brooklyn and raised in Great Neck, New York, I grew up hearing stories that my

immigrant Jewish grandparents told about the “old country” (Russia) that they left at the turn of

the last century. How I wish I had recorded and video-taped every one of their memories.

An avid reader for as long as I remember, I graduated from Harvard College in 1975 with a

degree in history and literature and went on to New College, Oxford, where I received an MA in

English in 1977. After a brief stint in book publishing, I launched my career as a freelance writer.

In recent years, I have been writing suspense-driven narrative non-fiction about the lives of

people caught up in events beyond their control, be it catastrophic weather, war, or genocide. My

2004 book The Children’s Blizzard, a national bestseller, won the Washington State Book Award

and the Midwest Booksellers Choice Award, and was nominated for a Quill Award.

I write frequently for the New York Times Travel Section, and I have also published in the

Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Seattle Times and Seattle Metropolitan.