Song for My Father is a very deceptive book. Deceptive in a good way. At the beginning it looks like it is going to be just another family saga with little to recommend it. Two sisters are growing up Jewish in Montreal. They are poor, dad is a lush and a womanizer, mom is a martyr. So what's new? The question becomes how well do we know our parents? Almost too late questions arise. Is what we've been led to believe really the way it happened. The sisters are young adults when their mother dies, and after that they slowly come to know a different father. The story becomes very moving and events happen that we don't expect. There is a very emotional scene where the elderly father, disabled with Alzheimers, leaves his nursing home and goes back to the apartment where he lived when the girls were little. A sweet-natured black man and his wife take him in for a couple of days until the sisters track him down. "Your father's fine," the woman tells the sisters. "We knew right away he had someone who loved him." This is indeed a very poignant song for a misunderstood father.