The Boy from Nowhere

A period piece memoir depicting the life of Richard Robison, who as a boy moved from town to town, swept along by his parents’ quest for the American Dream. Beautifully told, humorous, sometimes dark – this memoir deals with forgiveness, empathy, music, and pain. The story begins with Robison’s entry into fourth grade at a Rochester, New York city school where he finds himself, once again, the new kid in his class – his fourth school in four years. There he meets Matthias, a German American boy whose father was an American G.I. who helped liberate the Mauthausen concentration camp at the end of World War II. Another classmate and neighbor, a Jewish girl, Hannah, befriends him and introduces him to her family and culture. The unlikely alliance of Robison, Matthias, and Hannah grows through the school year until Robison is once again uprooted, this time to Buffalo, pulled in the slipstream of his father’s dream of a better life: money, status, a family well provided for. By tenth grade – several moves and new schools later – Robison is floundering from a life of discontinuity and disconnection from friends, classmates, teammates, and ultimately even his parents. His father’s ambition and drive lead down a path of alcoholism, violence, and resultant family secrecy. His mother’s inability to protect him and extricate herself from a dream gone bad adds another layer of damage to an already lost boy. But the memoir is not dark, not entirely, and includes passages where humor supplants pain, where activities – baseball, skiing, bicycling – provide positive experiences and healthy responses to the angst of teenage life. Robison reveals the importance of teachers both good and bad; of friends gained and lost; of girlfriends, real and longed for; of the need for empathy expressed and shared, and of the need for forgiveness.