The Way Home: Scenes from a Season, Lessons from a Lifetime

When Henry Dunow signs up to coach his son Max's Little League team on Manhattan's Upper West Side, he finds himself thinking of his own childhood and about his father, Moishe, and what had been missing from their relationship. Moishe, a Yiddish writer who had recently fled Hitler's Europe, was not a typical postwar dad. Though a tender and loving father, he considered recreation like playing catch with his son narishkeit, "foolishness." Such rites of an all-American boyhood as Little League and the world of sports were utterly foreign in Henry’s cloistered family.

Determined to be a different kind of parent to his first grader, Dunow bumbles through a self-test of fatherhood on the scruffy fields of New York's Riverside Park, playing coach, cheerleader, father, and friend to a ragtag bunch of seven-year-olds, many of whom are discovering baseball for the first time. His Galaxies are a varied lot-from one dreamy little boy who never stops talking to himself in the outfield, and another who has recently suffered a tragic loss and is angry at the world, to one who needs to be pointed in the direction of first base every time he's lucky enough to hit the ball.

The Way Home is the affecting and ironic story of Dunow's journey of discovery as he watches his relationship with Max evolve over the course of a Little League season. With the warmth and humor of a natural storyteller, Dunow recounts the antics of the Galaxies and shares keen observations about parenthood, Jewishness, urban life, and the culture of competition among men and boys. Along the way, he explores the difficult separation from his father and the choices he made in life that Moishe did not understand. He finds that what most renews the feeling of connection with his father-even long after he is gone-is the experience of becoming a father himself.

The Way Home is a touching story of a man trying to understand what it means to be a father even as he is still coming to terms with what it meant to be a son. It will speak to anyone striving to savor what is most precious and fleeting in family life.

Henry Dunow is a literary agent who lives in New York with his wife, Wendy, and their twins, Max and Madeleine.