Blood and Village

Book excerpt: At once a mystery of detection, a family history, and a rite of passage, Blood and Village traces the lives of the author's parents from the closing years of the 19th century in a small South German town to the New York neighborhoods where they raised their family. Why did they leave their bucolic village, the author asks, why them and so few others? In what sense did the village die after they left? And in having left, why did the village still have such a hold over them all their lives? In his search for some answers, the author delves into the social history of this Swabian village and describes his own return to its people, vineyards, pastures, and orchards. Along the way he ruminates on his father's World War I service and on his mother's trip back to the village in the turbulent summer of 1934, on his life in the 1940s and 1950s as a first-generation American, and on how the U.S. Navy and his research interests in physics brought him back to the village of his parents.