Abstract
A Man Comes from Someplace, Judith Pearl Summerfield's study of family history and folklore, defies easy description. Drawing on literary and cultural criticism, history, memoir, and storytelling, the book creates something that feels both innovative and familiar. Summerfield, Professor Emerita in English at Queens College, The City University of New York, has her origins in small-town southwestern Pennsylvania. Her parents, Martin (Motye) Pearl and Bessie Judd (Judkovitz) Pearl, connected after Motye's journey in 1921 from an Eastern European shtetl (small towns in Central and Eastern Europe with large Jewish populations) to Western Pennsylvania, and settled eventually in Fredericktown. This book chronicles her family's wanderings, drawing from hours of recorded interviews between Summerfield and her father, and an extraordinary cache of letters and images belonging to her Uncle Meyer.
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