Daniel Czitrom learned early on that radical politics was a family affair that stretched across generations and was shared around the kitchen table. In this historical memoir, Czitrom explores how memories and political beliefs shaped his life and his identity as a historian.

Czitrom follows three generations of his family as they fled violence in Eastern Europe, built new lives in America, and committed themselves to radical political movements. Their works and trials included union organizing, volunteering to fight fascism in Spain and elsewhere, harassment by the FBI, and everyday acts of survival. Czitrom describes what he discovered in his years of historical detective work while pondering the still-unanswered questions wrapped in silence and pain. He also recounts his years-long journey to balance loyalty to his family’s values with a desire to succeed, question authority, and become his own person.

An engaging blend of memoir and history, Kitchen Table History is the chronicle of a family and a personal search for the meaning of the past.

Daniel Czitrom is Emeritus Professor of History on the Ford Foundation at Mount Holyoke College. His books include New York Exposed: The Gilded Age Police Scandal That Launched the Progressive Era; Rediscovering Jacob Riis: Exposure Journalism and Photography in Turn of the Century New York; and Media and the American Mind: From Morse to McLuhan.

Advance praise for Kitchen Table History:

“As a historian, Daniel Czitrom knows that history is composed of social and economic forces, and he has spent much of his career chronicling them. But as a human being, he knows that it is also composed of the people who love you and nurture you. I found his exploration of his own family’s story fascinating, wise, and clear-eyed. He sees both their sense of justice and their illusions but never loses his own hopes for a radically more equal world.”
—Adam Hochschild, author of American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis

“Propelled by the lore of his own family, Dan Czitrom undertakes a series of journeys, searching for records, connections, forgotten lives, attempting to better understand the long and tangled history of ‘the left’ as it traveled to and developed in America. Kitchen Table History is a patchwork saga of hope, disappointments, and an abiding faith in the possibility of a better world.”
—John Sayles, filmmaker

“After a distinguished career as an American historian, Dan Czitrom turns his formidable research skills to uncovering his own family’s rich and complex story on two continents over the course of a century. Czitrom’s forebears came as immigrants to the United States fleeing European oppression. In their new homeland they struggled for survival in the tenements of New York, and for their rights to join a union. Some became Communists, and targets of decades of FBI harassment. They included in their number veterans of the Spanish Civil War and World War II, as well as survivors of pogroms and the Holocaust. This is, as Czitrom writes, not just a ‘personal story,’ but ‘an American story.’ It is also a gripping historical narrative, as recounted by a master of the genre.”
—Maurice Isserman, author of Reds: The Tragedy of American Communism

“In this engaging, accessible, and moving historical memoir, Daniel Czitrom shows how past upheavals and events can continue to shape the everyday lives of individuals and groups long after they seem to be over. Coming of age in the Bronx in the 1950s and 1960s for Czitrom meant encountering ghostly remnants of his family’s experiences with anti-Jewish pogroms, union organizing, the Spanish Civil War, and working-class communist militancy. The honest reflections and astute observations in this book demonstrate that while the hurts of history never really end, and cannot be wished away, they can be channeled to inspire and sustain worthy, meaningful, and honorable work in the world.”
—George Lipsitz, author of Ethnic Studies at the Crossroads