My Father’s Wars: Migration, Memory, and the Violence of a Century by Alisse Waterston (review)

It is common today for sensitive ethnographies to appear describing the micro-sociology of world historical processes, works that detail the intimate contexts where large-scale structural forces are played out and experienced at the level of the familial and the personal. But rarely do these endeavors take as their key informant a member of the author’s own family, complete with all the challenges and opportunities, contradictions and harmonies, afforded through the mixing of the personal and the professional in such anthropological undertakings. Rarer still are elegant accounts that accomplish all of the above, plus make use of new publishing and media technologies allowing readers access to a treasure trove of relevant hyperlinks embedded in the text. While some may find the hyperlinks in the text occasionally distracting, digitally savvy readers will appreciate being directed to the book’s companion site on the web where, with the simple tap of a button, relevant photographs, maps, videos, archival documents, visual art displays, multimodal essays, and audio files are all made available for those seeking more information. Yet all of this and more await the reader of Alisse Waterston’s meticulously researched and beautifully written book, My Father’s Wars: Migration, Memory, and the Violence of a Century, one of the first in Routledge’s new series of Innovative Ethnographies.

Waterston skillfully blends different methods of anthropological research and genres of writing, and combines the best of traditional ethnographic and historical scholarship, participant observation, and multi-sited fieldwork with newer techniques drawn from innovative biography, memoir, autoethnography, narrative theory, and several strands of reflexive anthropology. The result is an impressive approach the author dubs “intimate ethnography,” a technique she has pioneered with fellow anthropologist Barbara Rylko-Bauer, who also has written family narratives of the Holocaust (e.g., Rylko-Bauer 2014, Waterston and Rylko-Bauer 2006). More than a standard “life history,” the book portrays the dramatic story of the author’s father as he collides with world events, avoiding as best he can the shifting tectonic plates caused by forces beyond his control—not the least of which is a frustrating lack of fit between what used to be touted as the four pillars of British Social Anthropology, namely, politics, economics, religion, and kinship—as these impinge, usually threateningly, on his world. The emotionally gripping tale traces the life of a man whose name changes (from Mendel to Miguel to Michael) reflect fluid aspects of an evolving identity as they articulate with the cultural milieus through which he is compelled to move.

We first meet Mendel as a Jew born in Poland on the eve of World War I, who then becomes Miguel when he manages to escape the Holocaust by migrating with his family to Cuba before World War II. Miguel next morphs into Michael when he joins the US military, marries an American woman, and starts a transnational family that shuttles between Havana and New York, before finally having to leave Cuba for Puerto Rico after Castro comes to power and nationalizes his business. Along the way, Mendel-Miguel-Michael contends with two world wars, fascism, communism, dictatorship, revolution, corruption, migration, cash-flow crises, and what he characterizes as a gnawing lack of “respect,” the later of which is attributed to the rise of feminism and the erosion of patriarchy, and in its wake, what he sees as the virtual break up of his marriage and the splintering of his family. Throughout it all, we see a man who is at once tragic yet heroic, seemingly beaten down by life’s unrelenting blows but ultimately indomitable in the face of the titanic forces arrayed against him, the true causes of which he barely detects. As Waterston appositely remarks: “Like most, my father saw only the headlong stream; the violence of the riverbed remained imperceptible” (xviii). The magic of the volume derives from what Waterston calls the “narrative management” of this complementarity—the way the headlong stream...