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  • The Family

  • Three Journeys into the Heart of the Twentieth Century
  • Written by: David Laskin
  • Narrated by: Geoffrey Cantor
  • Length: 13 hrs and 25 mins
  • 5.0 out of 5 stars (1 rating)

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The Family cover art

The Family

Written by: David Laskin
Narrated by: Geoffrey Cantor
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Publisher's Summary

The author of the The Children's Blizzard delivers an epic work of 20th-century history through the riveting story of one extraordinary Jewish family.

With cinematic power and beauty, best-selling author David Laskin limns his own genealogy to tell the spellbinding tale of the three drastically different paths that his family members took across the span of 150 years.

In the latter half of the 19th century Laskin's great-great-grandfather, a Torah scribe named Shimon Dov HaKohen, raised six children with his wife, Beyle, in a yeshiva town at the western fringe of the Russian empire. The pious couple expected their sons and daughters to carry the family tradition into future generations. But the social and political upheavals of the 20th century decreed otherwise.

The HaKohen family split off into three branches. One branch emigrated to America and founded the fabulously successful Maidenform Bra Company; one branch went to Palestine as pioneers and participated in the contentious birth of the state of Israel; and the third branch remained in Europe and suffered the Holocaust.

In tracing the roots of his own family, Laskin captures the epic sweep of 20th-century history. A modern-day scribe, Laskin honors the traditions, the lives, and the choices of his ancestors: revolutionaries and entrepreneurs, scholars and farmers, tycoons and truck drivers. The Family is an eloquent masterwork of true grandeur - a deeply personal, dramatic, and universal account of a people caught in a cataclysmic time in world history.

©2013 David Laskin (P)2013 Penguin Audio

What the critics say

"The Family is as rich and poignant as any novel, only all true and impeccably researched.” (Erik Larson, New York Times best-selling author of In the Garden of the Beasts)

"A true triumph of historical storytelling.... David Laskin is a magical searcher into the past.... His generations of Cohens could be your Johansens, Smiths, Lopezes, Schmidts, O’Houlihans, even my Scottish peasant forebears.... The Family will touch you, heart and soul." (Ivan Doig, National Book Award finalist for This House of Sky)

"I read The Family without stopping, except sometimes to weep (and occasionally to chuckle). Through the stories of members of David Laskin’s large, dispersing family, history sharpens into individual lives and deaths and losses and becomes personal and vivid and tragic." (Edith Pearlman, National Book Critics Circle Award winner and National Book Award finalist for Binocular Vision)

What listeners say about The Family

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Family history

A beautifully told story of a family and the
aspects of chance and history on life.
Mr Laskin did a stellar job on researching his family history.
Arthur Kaminsky

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