In 1973, 10-year-old Jonathan Rosen and his family moved to New Rochelle, N.Y., a culturally sophisticated, intellectually vigorous middle-class suburb of New York City. It had been founded in 1688 by Huguenot refugees who fled France when Louis XIV declared Protestantism illegal. Jonathan’s father, Robert, was himself a European refugee. At the age of 6, he had been among the unaccompanied Jewish children rescued from Nazi-controlled Vienna and taken to the safety of New York. Robert never saw his parents again. They were murdered in the Holocaust. Robert, a professor of German literature, and his wife, Norma, a novelist, chose...