Meant to Be (142-194)

Summary
This part of the book was a little bit confusing because the author kept on skipping years of his life in every chapter. In the beginning of this section, he was 27 and just graduated Mercy College. By the end of this section, he was 57 with a grandchild. A lot of wonderful and unfortunate things happened to Walter during these pages. He lost his sister, Carol, a few months after he graduated Mercy College due to cancer. He wanted so bad to tell her their mother's secret before she died since they share all their secrets, but Walter hesitated and kept his mother's words. After her death, Walter was promoted editor of Parade, the largest circulation of any publication in America (back then). He met Elie Wiesel during that time as the head editor and they quickly became close friends. Elie was the author of Walter's favorite book Night and a survivor of the Holocaust. They had a deep conversation that night about the book and Elie's experience. Four years after they met, Elie Wiesel received the Nobel Piece Prize and Walter received an invitation to visit the Soviet Union. He went with his wife and it changed his life forever. He learned and stood on the very ground that 33,771 Jews were executed during the Holocaust. As he learned more and more about the Holocaust, he tied it back to his real Jewish father and himself. He learned what soul was, and at the end of his two-week voyage, he gave a 40 minute speech to the Soviet Union, thanking them for the visit and telling them what he learned through his trip.
The author skipped the next 13 years of his life and jumped into the year 2000. That year, his older brother, Bill, died. His mother, 87 at the time, cried and said, "Walter, there's nothing harder than to bury your own child. It's not natural. It's all wrong. I've faced it with Carol and now with Billy.... Thank God you're here." (Anderson 189). Now that his siblings were all gone, Walter and his mother agreed that they should let his children Eric and Melinda, know his mother's secret. So he told them and they were all understandable of the situation. However, Eric was curious and decided to search for Albert Dorfman (Walter's real father) and Herbert Dorfman (Walter's brother). Walter helped him on his search and found out that his real father had died just one year before his fake father died. However, Hebert was still alive and he is set out to look for him with his son Eric. This was the end of page 194.

Quote
"I agonized silently -irrationally- that somehow, inexplicably, I'd lose everything that I'd gained. I was thirty years old, and I was still angry." (Anderson 154)

Reaction
I thought this was a good quote because it showed how Walter doubted himself and found himself still angry. Even after he graduated College and is a journalist, like he wanted to be, he is still not happy. This shows how you can never let go of your past. He was always angry as a child because of his father's abuse. He joined the Navy because of that, but he just got angrier. When he came back to the civilized world, he was still angry because people mocked and frustrated him. And now, after having a wife, two wonderful children, and a college GED (graduated valedictorian and a gold medal for psychology), he still finds himself angry. I am thinking, is he angry because he was grown angry or because he is missing something in his life?