Among Strangers, A Family Story - Rilegato

Marietta Pritchard

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 1450710409 ISBN 13: 9781450710404

Casa editrice: The Impress Group, 2010

Riassunto

Among Strangers is a personal history covering several generations of Marietta Pritchard's family, beginning with their origins in Central Europe, and focusing especially on her grandfather Ernst Fuerth, an Austrian refugee to France, who perished there after being imprisoned by the Nazis.

Ernst was a wealthy industrialist who left Austria after the Nazi takeover, mistakenly thinking he could find safety in France. Instead, he was caught in the Nazi net and imprisoned at the camp at Drancy. During his time of exile, he wrote to his daughters, newly arrived in the U.S., as often as he could.

When Pritchard was given two of his letters as a gift from her mother, she had no idea what kind of a journey she was about to embark on. The gift opened the door to several years of work, during which mother and daughter explored the contents of some 200 pieces of correspondence, some of which had never reached their destination. They describe an ever-narrowing existence, beginning in confident hope and ending in sorrow and desperation.

Intertwined with Ernst's story are other narratives. A grandmother's ring and the vexed tale of a building in Vienna introduce the subject of inheritance. Fundamental questions of identity are raised as the author's immigrant parents make the transition from a high bourgeois life in Budapest to a newly Americanized one; and the author discovers her Jewish roots after a Catholic upbringing.

The book tells of inheritance and loss, of war and peace, of exile and rootedness, of the grief of separation and of the resilience of the human spirit.

The hardcover book, beautifully designed by The Impress Group, and is illustrated with many photographs and facsimiles of documents.

Su questo libro

About the Author:

Marietta Pritchard is a writer living in Amherst, Massachusetts. She is a former features editor at the Daily Hampshire Gazette and was a senior editor at New England Monthly.

Review:

This beautifully written and paced family memoir on themes of displacement -- the uneasy awareness many of us have that our roots were planted elsewhere -- moves with increasing intensity back two generations to the grandparents Marietta Pritchard never knew, with the languages she never spoke, as they they get swept from a graceful and cultured life in Hungary into the maelstrom of Western Europe and the Nazi occupation of France.

Out of weathered packets of letters, Pritchard draws the reader into the darkening menace as it herds her never-known grandfather towards the ultimate horror. One feels an intelligent curiosity becoming concentrated more on every page towards an unswerving obsession, and the memoir, with the spareness of Sophocles, growing to a tragedy. It is a wonderful book. --Peter Pouncey, author of Rules for Old Men Waiting

What a fine book. I read it all, practically at one sitting. Very moving, the narrative beautifully and gracefully constructed. --Novelist Caryl Phillips

Su questa edizione

• Editore: The Impress Group
• Data di pubblicazione: 2010
• ISBN 10: 1450710409
• ISBN 13: 9781450710404
• Rilegatura: Hardcover
• Numero edizione: 1
• Numero di pagine: 277