Conversions

Wars Cultures Religions and a Family Name

Sena, Michael L

Bokpresentation

Someone who has emigrated from a country, or whose parents or grandparents or great grandparents have emigrated, often claim to be from that country. They assume the identity of a Polish-American, a Swedish-Brazilian, an Italian-Australian.  The traits of the country that has been left become the inherited traits of the immigrants, their children and their children’s children.  They celebrate the holidays and eat the foods of the countries they left as if these were their own special holidays and their own traditional foods.  How much do we know about why our families left the countries where they had lived, about the circumstances of their emigration, whether they were forced by financial or political or social circumstances to uproot themselves and their own families in order to find a new and hopefully better life in their adopted country?  How much do we really know about how our families initially came to live in the places from which they emigrated?  In Conversions, Michael Sena explores the ideas of nationality and religion as defining characteristics of individuals and of the concept that anyone can claim categorically that he or she is exclusively a member of any race, religion or nation of birth.

Michael Lawrence Sena lives in Sweden with his wife, Britt Marie.  Together, they have run a consulting company for the past twenty-eight years offering advice in the fields of navigation systems, digital map databases and transportation strategies.  His earlier books include Beating Traffic: Time to Get Unstuck, and Francesco, the story of his maternal grandparents.