Lost in America: A Journey with My Father

Sherwin Nuland's powerful story traces the crumbling of his father's American Dream. As the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth, 19-year-old Meyer Nudelman emigrated to America from Russia and found, instead of expanding opportunities, a constricted life of sweatshop jobs, an overcrowded Bronx apartment shared with his mother-in-law and sister-in-law, illness, and the premature deaths of his wife and first son. Despairing and bitter, Nudelman saw his own health deteriorate to the point where even the simplest of tasks, like walking and eating, became a foray into the unpredictable. In this memoir, Nuland struggles with his father's legacy, acknowledging that the weight of so much illness inspired his own career in medicine, as the costs of his father's losses were transformed into the wealth of his personal development.