Lost Generations - Forbes.com

Book Review
Lost Generations
Robert Lenzner, 06.26.07, 6:00 AM ET

While caring for her elderly father, Lucinda Franks stumbled upon a trove of Nazi paraphernalia and became curious about what it all meant. Throughout her strained relationship with her father, Franks had never gotten a clear picture of what he did during World War II. Her memoir, My Father’s Secret War ($25, Miramax Books, 2007), is both a feat of investigative journalism and an attempt to come to terms with what Franks knew and didn't know about her father's life.

It's also representative of a new trend in memoir writing. Rather than writing purely personal tales, memoirists have turned to their parents' mysteries as a source of new inspiration. Former New York Times Executive Editor Joseph Lelyveld etched a remarkable and moving tale of a dislocated childhood with a mother and father alienated from each other. Franks, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, has bravely added to the genre.

We all want to rummage around in the past to determine the truth about our parents, our ancestors. After all, we are them. But it takes guts. Franks is courageously honest about herself, her difficulties with her father and her longing to be close to him.

"Behind my unrelenting push to get to the root of my father was the hope that I'd find goodness in him--and therefore in myself," Franks writes. The unhappiness of her childhood--in particular, her parents' divorce and her father's relationship with another woman--had left Franks feeling that she was a "bad egg."

Franks never gives up trying to help her father achieve some level of dignity as he lives out his days in a dingy apartment in a small, nondescript New England town. Though her father "continued to drain my emotional and financial resources," she craved a deep emotional attachment to him, and the book is part of that quest.

But she had only intermittent success. Allowing herself to become "all tangled up" with her father led to discoveries about his wartime experiences. Indeed, he had been something of a hero doing lonely reconnaissance on the movements of Japanese military forces in the Pacific. Why he never told his daughter about these experiences is troubling not only to Franks but to her readers. What's more, the tale of her father entering a Nazi concentration camp raises more questions than it answers. Why should he have been troubled by shooting a Nazi or an alleged double agent?

Her father's secret war paints a tableau of an evasive figure. I kept feeling so frustrated for Franks as she tried to piece together a personality that she felt she should have known. In this sense, the book should be compelling reading for all baby boomers dealing with their sick and elderly parents. It's depressing to know what can happen to you when you're no longer vibrant or don't have the resources to live with dignity.

There is some redemption for Franks' father when her husband, Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, arranges a proper military funeral for him aboard an aircraft carrier in New York Harbor. A noble ending for a difficult father who was more loved than he ever got to know.

Franks' story is a poignant tale about the need to connect with one's flesh and blood before it's too late. In human terms it's agonizing but so very true.

In her words: "In stripping away his dark mantles, I'd gotten back my real father--and given him air to breathe. The daughter who once didn't like him, who stopped by his car only long enough to hand him a check, is now the one who lingers beside him, hour after hour, actually interested--no, fascinated by him."

And, near the end of his life, Franks gave her father "a reason to get dressed in the morning, a reason to speak, a reason to be."