A powerful memoir about identity and the dark truths and lies within a family, here is the story of one man's struggle to prevent the problems of his past from seeping into his own son's future.
Shortly after his mother dies of breast cancer when he is ten years old, author Michael Blumenthal discovers a startling fact: his mother was not his biological mother, and his aunt and uncle, immigrant chicken farmers living in Vineland, New Jersey, are really his parents.
As fate would have it, his father, a German-Jewish refugee raised by a loveless and embittered stepmother after his own mother died in childbirth, has inflicted upon his adoptive son a fate uncannily, and terrifyingly similar, to his own: having first adopted Michael, in part, to save his dying wife, he then imposes on him the same sort of penurious and loveless stepmother whom he had to survive.
With these revelations, the "mysteries" that seem to have permeated his childhood are revealed and, with them, a quest for belonging that will infiltrate the author's entire adult life is triggered.
'All My Mothers And Fathers' is Michael Blumenthal's moving and powerful account of how he put his life together, and made a break from and a peace with his past.
