This memoir, which - chapter by chapter - I am currently posting on the website's blog section, deals with a universal human need: to search for and understand our parents and ultimately ourselves.

 

I lost my parents when I was young, Mom died when I was 11 and Dad when I was 18. I was left alone in Argentina with no immediate family. I immigrated to the US and studied: first, science; then, law. Given my training in both areas, and the technological revolutions in biotechnology and computer science that were occurring in the early 1980s, I became the co-founder of a law firm. Today, my firm is renown worldwide in the field of intellectual property in multiple areas of high technology.

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Yet, in parallel to my professional successes, I never let go of a lifelong need to get to know my late parents. Not just as a child but as an adult. This highly personal memoir describes my lifelong efforts to track down their histories and those of their - my - families. It is the story of my quest to get to know them after their deaths. To accomplish this, I traveled to the four corners of the world: Italy, Greece, Turkey, Austria, and Latin America. In a dramatic instance, I discovered a large European family that my late father had never mentioned. My memoir is therefore also a story of reconciliation between Dad and me decades after his death.

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The memoir weaves my stories in the context of multiple generations touched by different cultures, languages, and religions. I traveled a lot, both in space and time. I also provide the reader with insight into the power of objects and places to elicit Proustian memories. Many chapters are centered around an object or a city with which Mom or Dad were emotionally associated; and I use those to bring my parents back from the distant past.