Don’t Be Such a Big Shot

A family memoir of identity, secrets, and survival

Now available in audiobook, ebook, and paperback.

About The Book

Rich Newman grew up in Jackson Heights, Queens, believing his family’s story was straightforward: Immigrants came to America, worked hard, and built a life. Like many families, the details were fuzzy—but the outline felt clear enough.

It wasn’t.

As Rich grew older—and as his own career in finance and technology unfolded—he began to see the gray areas in both his family’s past and his own identity. What had been framed as resilience often involved silence. What looked like certainty hid contradictions. And what went unspoken shaped just as much as what was said.

Don’t Be Such a Big Shot traces four generations of one family’s journey: from pogroms in Poland and eight years in the Russian army, to cousins who survived Auschwitz, to parents shaped by war, prejudice, and quiet endurance in the Bronx, and finally to a son navigating race, class, and belonging in modern America.

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The book moves across places and worlds:
a multi-ethnic Queens childhood, a German exchange program in the 1970s, life aboard a Navy ship, and a career inside once WASP-dominated corners of Wall Street.

But its real focus is closer to home.

After the death of his mother, Rich found himself finally hearing the stories his father, Dan, had never told—about his own parents, about marriage and distance, about silence as a survival strategy. This stood in sharp contrast to his mother Rose’s family, who spoke endlessly about the past, often in stark black-and-white terms.

Between those two approaches—speaking and silence—Rich began to understand how he was shaped.

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As he dug through birth certificates, ship manifests, faded photographs, and records uncovered during his search for Polish citizenship, names once mentioned in passing became real people with complicated lives of their own. The past stopped being abstract. It became personal.

Woven with humor, humility, and unflinching honesty, Don’t Be Such a Big Shot is not just a family memoir. It’s a meditation on inherited fear, moral grayness, identity, and the conversations we wish we’d had before it was too late.

The title comes from Rich’s grandmother Sara, who used to admonish her husband, Rich‘s grandfather, whenever he got too full of himself:

“Don’t be such a big shot.”

It’s a rebuke.

It’s a reminder.

And in the end, it’s the quiet moral center of the book.