An Echo in My Blood

Chapter 1

1. In what setting does this memoir begin, and why?
2. What is the authors' personal connection to this setting?Why was that connection painful to him in 1993?
3. What life seems to be thriving there, and why? Is it really thriving?
4. How did this setting get its name?
5. Why do the author and his guide go to Mala Viska?
6. According to the story Weisman's father told, who killed his grandfather and why?
7. Weisman grew up on his father's "legends of wartime poverty." Describe one.
8. In 1991, Weisman and his partner Cecilia were working on an NPR series called Vanishing Homelands. Where was it set and what was it about?
9. How did Weisman imagine his parents when he spoke to them on the phone?
10. What US military action was about to break out, obscuring Weisman's efforts to "chroncile how entire cultures were becoming endangered species"?
11. Weisman's father resented both his brother and his son, "Uncle Herman," for what he called their "communist" leanings. But Uncle Herman tells a different story of the death of his father. How is it different?

Chapter 23

1. At the end of the book, Weisman is sifting through boxes and reading about events from 1919-21 in his grandfather's home. Why is it hard to discover exactly what happened to his grandfather's family?
2. Weisman makes a "good guess" about what side his "wily, successful grandfather" took. What is it?
3. A series of pogroms began on December 31, 1918, in which Jews were killed under the pretext of being "communist sympathizers." Weisman says this "euphemism" was used to justify the slaughter of other groups in this century. Give some examples.
4. On February 14, 1919, a Ukrainian leader named Petylura had his men kill over 10,000 Jews. Several other groups joined the slaughter. Petlyura is followed by Grigoriev and Makno, who do plenty of damage to Ukranian jews, and then Denikin's Cossack army. What is Denikin's stated attitude toward the Pogroms? What happens in August and September 1919 that contradicts his words?
5. In September, the Jews appeal to Deniken through a group called "The Main Committee for the Alliance for Regeneration of Russia in Ukraine." How did the Jews try to appeal to Denikin? What was his reponse?
6. What was the response of the US and the British to these pogroms?
7. Weisman finds no trace of his grandfather's name among his former holdings in Mala Viska except a vague reference to a post-pogrom auction. Why not? When Weisman's grandmother returns to Mala Viska the next spring, what does she find? What does she take away?
8. How many Jews died in pogroms in the Russian Civil war? Why doesn't history remember them?
9. When and where did Denikin die?
10. Weisman learns that his father "rewrote" the story of his family's past. What does a Tarahumaran elder in the Sierra Madre say that helps Weisman understand why his father did this?
11. Weisman believes his American audience of immigrants has collectively learned to "mythologize and tidy up the past." What does he mean by that?
12. Weisman says he bears witness to a "pogram against the ecosystem" and observes the "pogroms against the poor" by "conservative demagogues." Explain one of those connections to the present.
13. In what way does Weisman link his perception of his God to his own father?