Book of Real-Life Stories
Fear, Fathers, and Family by Jon J Masters
Two Lives. One Hidden Truth
Power, Pressure, and the Illusion of Control
Within the family, his father was in charge, threatening to die if the secret was revealed. In his public life, Jon believed he was immune to the consequences of denial. He went to top schools, was mentored by high-ranking superiors, and, as a young naval officer, was marked for success among a circle of seasoned Washington policymakers.
When Everything Starts to Unravel
By the time he was 40, it all started to come apart. He didn't know who he was. By then, he was a father and a husband. He had no confidantes and held his wife at arm's length for fear of exposing the secret and was terrified of the consequences of doing so.
Healing the Past, Protecting the Future
This is the story of what brought him to that point and what he did to protect his children, save his marriage, maintain his career, and nourish his soul. Family took precedence over power, and healing the family trauma became his priority. Helping his children become independent, caring, and accomplished in ways of their own choosing was his goal.
Jon’s Book Through Other Eyes
"Though fashioned as a memoir, Jon Masters has actually written a compelling guide in the vein of Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. What haunted (and inspired) Masters may seem specific, but the themes are universal—ethnic self-consciousness, dark family secrets, difficult parent-child relationships—and how one moves beyond them into that elusive American Dream. Masters' no-nonsense life lessons and evolving priorities are conveyed at a page-turning pace. He is a riveting storyteller, a mentor for everyone who wants to make it or has children they hope will reach for the sky."
-Dr. Ron Taffel, internationally recognized therapist, author, and educator on family-life issues
Jon Masters' Fear, Fathers, and Family is a vivid and candid portrait of a classic father-son conflict. The dominating father in Mr. Masters' engaging memoir challenges his son's as well as his family's identity by demanding assimilation as a secret and unchallenged commitment. As Mr. Masters narrates his passage from repressed Jew to enrolled Episcopalian, he treats his readers to an insightful evaluation of the social as well as spiritual values that plagued so many families of immigrants in the mid-twentieth-century U.S.A. Fear, Fathers, and Family achieves that rarity among intimate memoirs—a painful personal confession that dramatizes an aspect of our social history."
-Sidney Offit, author of novels and two memoirs, conducts writing workshops at The New School and Hunter College.
Jon Masters' memoir, Fear, Fathers and Family, aligns one man's life along the crooked paths of history and family, anti-Semitism, and secrets. Charged with preserving the secret of his Jewishness as a child and learning to embrace the power of truth as a man, Masters models how to navigate the complexities of love and identity to become the father and the man he can proudly show the world."
-Gail Mellow, President of LaGuardia Community College
A very thorough and thoughtful insight into family dynamics and family secrecy!
K. Masters
This book is remarkable for some of the reasons that are obvious from reading it. Its theme is the conflict within the author’s family over race and secrecy. Masters is Jewish, and his father insisted this be a family secret as he sought to establish a new name and a patrician identity in the upper-class society of Manhattan. By acceding to this demand, actually a threat, Masters faced a long series of challenges that ended with his refusal to hide the truth when he was 40.
The other features of the book are, first, a running experiential narrative that culminates in a final chapter that seems to me wise enough to warrant a book in itself. Secondly, and more rarely, Masters offers an honest window on a most interesting and varied life from the part of society that Jon Masters has occupied, really, all his life.
I place this book in a small pantheon with two other honest accounts. One is Kate Millett's "Flying." The other is Robert Pirsig’s “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance." The common thread is the willingness of these writers to go deep, unsullied by the many motives that can turn authorship away from letting things get said that must be said.
Masters overcame a great deal while having several careers, including advising persons of note and acting on stage and TV. More unusual are glimpses one gets of love and vulnerability that are not papered over. I was particularly moved by accounts of his children and their communications with him.
The book ends abruptly with an excellent chapter that consists of life lessons and good advice. It is followed by a substantial afterword by the author’s brother. While this is of interest, I feel that I would most like to see the very same book with a final chapter in which the author tells us the rest of the story: the later years of his most interesting life.
All told, an enjoyable and stimulating read.
-Stephen C. Rose
Jon Masters' "Fear, Fathers, and Family" is a captivating journey on multiple levels—parents keeping a life-altering secret in a world of crippling anti-Semitism; Jon's singular personal progress in the Pentagon, legal, and corporate professions; building a family; and finally distilling what's really important. I highly recommend "Fear, Fathers, and Family" to anyone interested in an insider's personal history of 20th-century America by a highly moral, self-made 'insider.'
Anthony Grass, President of e-Market Intelligence.
Born to privilege, Jon Masters traces his journey of self-actualization, not from rags to riches but from the person he thought he should be to the person he truly is. I once heard someone remark, “I used to be different…now I’m the same.” Clearly, Jon knows what this means.
R. Chalmers
The book’s unique mix of humor and drama could only come from someone who had lived a double life and survived as an integrated, honest person alive to tell the tale. There is no boasting or posing here, despite the author’s self-description as “brash” and “cocky.” This is a real Mensch talking; you can tell. Structured for suspense (we don’t learn the Secret until well into the narrative), the book is a true page-turner. I began reading the book late in Labor Day weekend and could not put it down until I finished it at 3 AM on back-to-work Tuesday. At the same time, there’s plenty of visual detail, emotional depth, and (sometimes dark) humor in the vignettes.
A. Lajoux
In Fear, Fathers, and Family, Jon Masters tells a compelling story that is part memoir and (in its description of anti-Semitism) part social history. He was raised in the 1940s and ’50s by socially ambitious parents who were determined to hide the fact that they were Jewish and to cut themselves and their children off from their extended Jewish family and all of Jewish society. At the same time, Jon’s father demanded that he excel in all activities and win all the possible prizes so that the doors of high society and high-status professions would be open to him. With remarkable openness and honesty, Jon describes how, as a youth and a young man, he went along with the family secret, was driven by the need to fulfill his father’s demand to always be the best, and was challenged in important relationships because of his need to hide the truth of who he really was. The book tells the story of the author’s increasing self-awareness, his efforts to overcome his father’s destructive influence, and the importance of his love for his wife and children in his finding the strength to do so.
In light of his many professional and personal accomplishments and his varied interests, it appears that in many respects the author has fulfilled his father’s ambitions for him, while resisting and overcoming the parental injunctions that were damaging to him. This book should be fascinating for anyone who has struggled to overcome the destructive aspects of a parent’s influence while still owning and exemplifying those parental beliefs and values that are life-enhancing.
J. Congress