The Longest Visit: A Memoir

Although he carried a business card for twenty-seven years, says the author of this arresting memoir, “It didn’t define who I am. It was a practical choice at best, as my passion lay elsewhere.”

This passion for life comes across loud and clear. Unlike most immigrants, he spent decades caught emotionally between the land he was born to and the one he chose to move to. The loss of his father at an early age in many ways defined this struggle, the decisions Eli Makover reached, and the nature of the important relationships he forged over those decades. He appeared in Los Angeles on a lark, for a short visit, and never left—because it seized him. Unlike so many others, he relied on the deepest wellsprings of his character and spirit to point his way. And it was finally through his own children’s eyes, even more than through conventional therapy, that he came to realize who he was and what he was meant to do with his life.

This is a book whose very brevity disguises an enormous thoughtfulness and sweep of emotional expression. Makover asks the kinds of questions we would all profit from posing but rarely do: How can love sustain itself? What truly counts in this dance of life? He is by turns surprised, joyful, and despairing, and we feel in his search for wholeness a way to understand our own, for this is also a deeply human record that reveals a very full heart.