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My Fathers' Houses is the story of a town, a time, and a boy who would grow up to become a New York Times correspondent, television and radio personality, and bestselling author.
William Morrow
May 2005
272 pages
ISBN: 0060739932
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Memoir
Bayonne prepared me well for a larger life and a larger
world. I knew who I was and where I was from. I was
connected by innumerable little cords to people and places
that gave me strength and identity. On The Block I was
safe, secure, loved. I even had a number, 174, the address
of our house, but the number wasn't a badge of anonymity.
To the contrary, it marked my place, where I belonged. As moving as Russell Baker's Growing Up and Calvin
Trillin's Messages from My Father, My Fathers'
Houses is the story of a town, a time, and a boy who
would grow up to become a New York Times
correspondent, television and radio personality, and
bestselling author. In this remarkable memoir, Steven V. Roberts tells the
story of his grandparents, his parents, and his own life,
vividly bringing a period, a place, and a remarkable family
into focus. The period was the forties and fifties, when
the children of immigrants were striving to become American
in a booming postwar world. The place was one block in
Bayonne, New Jersey, and the house that Roberts's
grandfather, Harry Schanbam, built with his own hands, a
warm and reassuring home, just across the Hudson River
from "the city," where Roberts grew up surrounded by family
and tales of the Old Country. This personal journey starts in Russia, where the family
business of writing and ideas began. A great-uncle became
an editor of Pravda and two great-aunts were original
members of the Bolshevik party. His other grandfather,
Abraham Rogowsky, stole money to become a Zionist pioneer
in Palestine and helped to build the second road in Tel
Aviv before settling in America. Roberts returns his saga
to Depression-era Bayonne, where his parents, living one
block apart, penned love letters to each other before
marrying in secret. His father, an author and publisher of
children's books, and his uncle, a critic and short story
writer, instilled in him a love for words and a
determination to carry on the family legacy, a legacy he is
now passing on to his own children and grandchildren. Roberts, too, would leave home, for Harvard, where he met
Cokie Boggs, the Catholic girl he would marry, and later,
for the New York Times, where he would start his
career -- across the river and worlds away from where he
began. An emotional, compelling story of fathers and sons,
My Fathers' Houses encapsulates the American
experience of change and continuity, of breaking new ground
using the tools and traditions of the past.
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