Creative Writing Commons^™

In My Father's Study, Benjamin S. Orlove

Singular Lives: The Iowa Series in North American Autobiography

In 1921 Solomon Orlovski, a Russian Jew born in 1904, emigrated to America and transformed himself into Robert Orlove, a pattern maker in two senses of the term: during the day, he worked in the fur trade in New York and Chicago, making patterns for toys and hats; in his private life he became a self-taught artist who created prints, sketches, and collages in his study. More than sixty years later his son Ben—an anthropologist educated at Harvard and Berkeley—walked through the doorway of the deceased Robert's study and began to explore more than a half century ...