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Origins And Early Jobs: A Bronx Autobiography, Joel Halpern

Joel M. Halpern

For me to work with my father in reconstructing his life and, by extension, my own past, has been a challenging journey. Even though my father lived in a society where records were kept, the magnitude and administrative anonymity of a big city have made the search for supporting documents on family and factory enterprise a hard one. As an anthropologist I have spent most of my professional life over four decades writing about Serbian peasants, the royal court in Laos, and Inuit (Eskimo) settlements. These are people with known pasts whose local roots go deep and whose history lies …