Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nick Kotz’s work covered some of the biggest events of the 20th century, from defense spending to the modern civil rights movement. There was only one frontier his work had never entered: his own family history.
“Both in college and as a journalist for many years, I thought that history was in the big events: Who won the presidential election? How did the war in Vietnam go?” he told an audience in the George Washington University Marvin Center Amphitheater Thursday evening.
There was “very little humanity” in his own big-picture instincts, he said. “In my earlier works, there was too little about people and what makes them tick.”
Working on The Harness Maker’s Dream, a book about his immigrant grandfather Nathan Kallison, “totally changed my perspective,” Mr. Kotz said.
“It led me to embrace the idea that maybe the most meaningful way to look at American history is to start with families,” he said.
Mr. Kotz spoke to students and community members as part of Jewish Literature Live, an English Department course taught by Faye Moskowitz and sponsored by David Bruce Smith, B.A. ’79.
For Mr. Kotz, his grandfather’s story was unknown territory.
He “knew zero,” he admitted, about the conditions in Czarist Russia that led to his grandfather’s and grandmother’s flights to the United States at the ages of 17 and 15 respectively.
Nathan Kallison, Mr. Kotz’s maternal grandfather, opened a harness shop in Chicago in the early 1890s. With the rise of the automobile, however, he foresaw the end of his livelihood. He moved to Texas, “where the horse was still king,” as Mr. Kotz said, and grew his business into a farm and ranch supply store.
The Kallisons, Russian Jews, faced the challenges of assimilation in a rural community during what Mr. Kotz said was “the second-greatest depression in American history.” They achieved great success, the business flourishing until the 1960s. It was an outcome perhaps more triumphant than typical in what Mr. Kotz, quoting President John F. Kennedy, called the “nation of immigrants.”
Describing his writing process, Mr. Kotz praised the “extraordinary breadth of information” available online, even distributing to the audience a list of the sources he used to get access to genealogical and historical records.
His previous book, Judgment Day, about the relationship between Martin Luther King Jr. and President Lyndon B. Johnson, took him three years to write, he said. Without the Internet, “I could have written a worse book, and it would have taken me 20 years.”
After his talk, he opened the floor to questions about his writing process, the current state of journalism and other topics, even asking the audience to discuss his own omissions and mistakes.
“This course is unlike any other taught in the United States and probably in the world,” said Ms. Moskowitz. “A student is able to read six or seven works, generally of fiction, and after each one, the author is able to come and talk with those students and have a dialogue with them. It’s a wonderful privilege to teach.”
Mr. Kotz encouraged his audience to look into the stories hidden in their own families—and to save their own records for researchers who might come later.
“It will give you a far greater understanding of your own life,” he said.