Tell Me I Belong

In this heart-wrenching memoir by a renowned transplant doctor who grew up without religion, a journey of self-discovery as he uncovers his family's past.

David Weill grew up in New Orleans the only son of a world-famous Jewish pulmonologist and a Southern Baptist mother. Religion was never discussed in his home, and as a young child, Weill always felt something was amiss—that he never quite fit in with either his Christian or Jewish friends. These feelings stayed with him even as he became the head of heart and lung transplant at Stanford University, which lead to two journeys of discovery: first, converting to Catholicism, and then embarking on an intense search for his Jewish roots after he discovered his mother had converted.

The author takes the reader on his journey—hiring investigators in Berlin, who found his grandfather’s records of his time imprisoned in the Buchenwald concentration camp; a heart-wrenching trip to Berlin to find his father’s first home—and ultimately does the internal work to define himself.