My Father's Wars ─ Migration, Memory, and the Violence of a Century

""My father was born into war," begins this remarkable saga in Alisse Waterston's intimate ethnography, a story that is also twentieth century social history. This is an anthropologist's vivid account of her father's journey across continents, countries,cultures, languages, generations--and wars. It is a daughter's moving portrait of a charming, funny, wounded and difficult man, his relationships with those he loved, and his most sacred of beliefs. And it is a scholar's reflection on the dramatic forcesof history, the legacies of culture, the experience of a Jewish immigrant, and the enduring power of memory. This book is for Sociology and Anthropology courses in qualitative methods, ethnography, violence, migration, and ethnicity"--

Alisse Waterston is Professor, Department of Anthropology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York. She is Editor, Open Anthropology, and President-elect, American Anthropological Association.
Professor Waterston is author of two ethnographies on urban poverty in the US (Love, Sorrow and Rage: Destitute Women in a Manhattan Residence, and Street Addicts in the Political Economy), and of the edited volumes An Anthropology of War: Views from the Frontline and Anthropology off the Shelf: Anthropologists on Writing (co-edited with Maria D. Vesperi). Alisse Waterston is a Soros International Scholar affiliated with Tbilisi State University in Gender Studies, and serves on the Executive Board, American Anthropological Association.