Overview

In these essays, Toynton remembers her emigre relatives, some of whom left Germany as soon as Hitler came to power, others only escaped later. Evelyn Toynton's relatives, German-Jewish refugees all, had grown up thinking of themselves as Germans first and Jews second; her portraits of them, subtly comic when depicting the Germanic traits they retained throughout their lives, take on a tragic poignancy when showing the sorrow they carried: how could their beloved country, so inextricably a part of who they were, have turned on them with such murderous savagery? While some of them embraced their new lives, becoming patriotic citizens of America and England, and one became a Zionist, rising to high office in Ben-Gurion's government, others went on reading German books, German newspapers; they made nostalgic trips back to Nuremberg, where the family had thrived for centuries before the Nazis claimed it as their symbolic home. But it is the story of Toynton's refugee mother, of the betrayal and the medical blunder that kept her living in the shadows for fifty years, that is at the emotional heart of this book. Toynton speaks to a universal immigrant family experience, some embrace a new life, others forge a compromise between their new home and old traditions, while a few never fully find their way.

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9781953002563

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Reviews

""The author's tone is often elegiac. . . . A thoughtful, notable addition to the literature of the Holocaust and those survivors who started anew in America. . . a poignant memoir."" —Kirkus Reviews “This priceless recapturing of darkened history, this lifetime’s rumination on family results in a stunningly intelligent and elegantly written work, whose honesty, maturity, perspective and wisdom are so rare in today’s memoirs. I found it utterly engrossing.”—Phillip Lopate, author of To Show and to Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction ""Poignant. . .a fascinating memoir.""—The Jewish Journal “This book enchanted me in every way. With Toynton's signature intelligence, subtlety and wit, she describes members of her family —deracinated through no fault of their own — in portraits that are by turns surprising, hilarious and heartbreaking.  They speak to the punishment of expulsion, the longing for what was left behind, the finality of exile. I shall reread this book at least once a year to remind myself of what a good memoir can be.”—Lynn Freed, author of The Romance of Elsewhere “Evelyn Toynton’s German Jewish family was one of the lucky ones, who escaped the Holocaust and made it to America. But her tragic, comic, sharply observed memoir shines a brilliant light on their fate, ‘marooned for life’, as she writes of her uncle, in a strange loneliness.”—Carole Angier, author of Speak, Silence: In Search of W.G. Sebald""

Author Information

Evelyn Toynton is the author of three novels—Modern Art (published by Delphinium Books, chosen as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year); The Oriental Wife; and Inheritance – as well as a short biography of Jackson Pollock for Yale University Press’s Icons of America series. Among the journals to which she has contributed are The London Review of Books, Harpers, The Atlantic, the TLS, The New York Times Book Review, The Threepenny Review, Salmagundi, and numerous anthologies. For the past twenty-five years, she has lived in England, on the North Norfolk coast.

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