LOST ROOTS

In this biographical work, a man charts his family’s perilous experiences during the 20th century’s two world wars and the secrets they engendered.

Von Loewe was raised in a distinctively German tradition—his family sang German songs; he studied the German language; and the house was filled with German books. But the author knew little of his father’s ancestry—Sigmund was typically tight-lipped about such matters, and he died when von Loewe was only 17 years old, before his curiosity reached full bloom. Once he began to studiously investigate his father’s genealogy, he came to some shocking realizations. His father was the bearer of a Polish passport that bore the last name Kiedrowski. Sigmund grew up in the German province of West Prussia, in a Kashubian community in what is now northern Poland. In response to the grim devastation of World War I, both Sigmund and his brother, Johann, formally changed their names, hoping a German identification would help them more securely navigate an increasingly chaotic continent. After serving as a pilot in the war and then working as a diamond trader, Sigmund made his way to the United States in 1923 to work as a jeweler. Von Loewe chronicles, with extraordinary meticulousness, not only Sigmund’s self-exile to the U.S., but also the terrible impact Nazi aggression had on the members of his family who remained in Europe during World War II—they would face execution, imprisonment, starvation, and the bleak depredations of concentration camps. He “would be a helpless observer as family in Germany and Poland were caught up in the horror.” The author’s father paid a steep price for his survival—he was compelled to abandon his heritage, a sacrifice explained poignantly by von Loewe. Furthermore, the author’s research is impressive—unsurprisingly, he’s an academic historian—and he limns his father’s story and the fate of war-torn Europe with admirable rigor. But that painstaking devotion to granular detail is as much a vice as a virtue—this microscopic account of his relatives’ experiences is unlikely to command the attention of readers who lack a personal connection to them.

A scrupulous, intelligently executed, if overly detailed, family history.