Hugging My Father's Ghost

In this memoir, Zack Rogow tries to solve the mystery of the father he never knew. Lee Rogow was a widely published fiction writer, drama critic for the Hollywood Reporter, glamorous man-about-town in Manhattan of the 1950s, captain of a submarine-chaser in World War II-and he died tragically in a plane crash when his son Zack was only three years old.

For decades, grief kept Zack from looking closely at his father's writings. In Hugging My Father's Ghost, Zack delves into his father's unpublished work and unearths treasures. The memoir includes Lee Rogow's most intimate writings that have never seen the light of day. Those pages reveal intriguing secrets about Zack's parents and their complex connections to the couple their children knew as godparents. The memoir intersperses Zack's father's writings, Zack's reflections on his parents and the Greatest Generation, and imaginary conversations between his father and himself. The book blends laugh-out-loud humor with sharp pathos, while dealing with the pressures on immigrant families and how those impacted the fates of his parents.