They Were Good Germans Once – Linwood Messina

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Author:

Evelyn Toynton

Date:

Delphinium Books
May 2024

Author:

Additional Info

THEY WERE GOOD GERMANS ONCE

Rights Holder: Delphinium Books
Original Language: English

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

While Evelyn Toynton’s father became a civic-minded American, with a great sense of obligation to his suburban community, her uncle never stopped feeling like an exile in the US; as soon after World War II as he could, he started making trips back to Germany.

The women in her family also had widely varying relationships to the societies in which they found refuge. One of them, after browbeating a Nazi police chief into arranging for her husband’s release from Dachau, wound up in England and became a passionate Anglophile; another, a widow deprived of all material comfort and security, retreated into seclusion in her tiny New York apartment, distancing herself from American life and finding solace in her beloved German poets.

A fierce Zionist who smuggled guns and money from Europe into Palestine under the noses of the British went on to found a kibbutz and fight for the rights of Arabs as well as Jews.

Then there was the author’s German-born mother, who emigrated to the U.S. only to be struck down by tragedy and forced to live separately from her children, but still found ways to nurture them and provide them with a haven from their own troubles.

All of them had lost not only their homeland and their sense of identity but also many of the people they loved. Yet almost all found ways to give meaning to their lives, either in their own small circles or in the larger world.

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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