The Book of Knee

About the Book

The Book of Knee: 100 Years of an American Jewish Family is an anecdotal and photographic history of a middle-aged couple and their six children who emigrated to the United States in the 1920s and found what they were looking for: better lives for themselves and their children. In a light-handed and sometimes humorous way, the book traces the family from the shtetl of Dembitz, Poland, shortly after the end of World War I to the present, mostly through the memories and stories of a group of first cousins who spent many of the Sundays of their childhoods together. It is a repository of family history from those who have long passed to those who have yet to be born.

About the Author

Cynthia (Knee) Rawitch first became interested in writing a family history–memoir after a 2013 visit to the Polish shtetl where her father and his siblings lived before emigrating to America in the 1920s. Ongoing conversations with her cousins focused the idea on the impact of the Sundays they spent together as children in New York. Writing comes fairly naturally to Rawitch, as she started her professional career in the late 1960s as a reporter for The Associated Press. She retired in 2015 as a professor of journalism and vice provost at California State University, Northridge. The mother of three grown children and six grandchildren, Rawitch lives in Southern California with her husband, Bob, and their two dogs, Anderson Cooper and Katharine Graham.