In 1921 Solomon Orlovski, a Russian Jew born in 1904, emigrated to America and transformed himself into Robert Orlove, a pattern maker in two senses of the term: during the day, he worked in the fur trade in New York and Chicago, making patterns for toys and hats; in his private life he became a self-taught artist who created prints, sketches, and collages in his study. More than sixty years later his son Ben—an anthropologist educated at Harvard and Berkeley—walked through the doorway of the deceased Robert's study and began to explore more than a half century of his father's experiences, thoughts, and emotions as well as his own very different life. His wry, sensitive combination of biography, memoir, and autobiography taps a remarkably rich vein of individual and collective experience in our diverse society.

Ben Orlove's dual narrative constitutes a family history of notable breadth and immediacy. By turns passionate and cool, dramatic and analytic, he excavates his father Robert's lifetime accumulation of diaries, letters, clippings, photographs, and artworks to create a convincing, deeply satisfying portrait that link both father and son.

Professor in the Division of Environmental Studies at the University of California, Davis, Ben Orlove grew up in Brooklyn and studied at Harvard and Berkeley. He has done fieldwork in the Andean highlands of Peru and Bolivia and in Chile and Mexico. He lives with his wife and three children in Davis.

 “Combining an anthropologist's curiosity with a son's heartache, Ben Orlove offers us an engaging memoir of his father's dreams and losses as a Jew in America. A sensitive, unusual, and highly moving account.”—Ruth Behar