Prophets Without Honour is a collective biography set in an extraordinary epoch of cultural history sometimes called “the Weimar Renaissance.” In a series of mini-portraits, Grunfeld has written a tribute to the German-speaking scientists, musicians, writers and artists who created European cultural life in the early twentieth century. All were evicted or murdered by the Nazis. Albert Einstein, Walter Benjamin, Sigmund Freud, Gustav Mahler, and Franz Kafka are the best-known of his subjects but Grunfeld includes such lesser-known figures as Else Lasker-Schüler, Ernst Toller, Gertrud Kolmar, Alfred Döblin, Erich Mühsam, Carl Sternheim, Kurt Tucholsky and Hermann Broch. Grunfeld summarizes their lives, illuminates their work, traces their interactions, and sets it all against the background of Central European political and cultural life in the first three decades of the last century. “Grunfeld’s fascinating ‘collective biography’... is a peculiar and moving achievement because it puts faces and feet on ideas... one of the odd pleasures of this book is, in its digressions, Mr. Grunfeld’s curiosity.” — John Leonard, The New York Times “He has put the whole awful, tragic, somehow ennobling story together with a quiet passion and a wealth of unexpected details.” — Alfred Kazin “This is a fascinating introduction, written with clarity, compassion, and verve. Strongly recommended.” — Library Journal “Grunfeld has brought to life a whole generation that had been buried alive... To read this book is an intellectual adventure. One partakes of the great drama of art and politics played out by Germans and Jews before the darkness fell over Europe.” —Lucy Dawidowicz
Dennis B. Klein explores the Jewish consciousness of Freud and his followers and the impact of their Jewish self-conceptions on the early psychoanalytic movement. Using little-known sources such as the diaries and papers of Freud's protégé Otto Rank and records of the Vienna B'nai B'rith that document Freud's active participation in that Jewish fraternal society, Klein argues that the feeling of Jewish ethical responsibility, aimed at renewing ties with Germans and with all humanity, stimulated the work of Freud, Rank, and other analysts and constituted the driving force of the psychoanalytic movement.
“Robert Wistrich’s exemplary scholarly analysis of the Viennese Jewish community in the 19th century is the first well-written, reliable study of its kind... gives elegant portraits of the crucial Jewish figures of the new Viennese politics at the turn of the century... focus[es] on the internal history of the highly diversified Jewish community... [Wistrich] analyzes effectively the genesis of Herzl’s Zionism from within the Viennese context. Although his sympathies for Zionism are clear, he is respectful of Jewish critics of Zionism. What is refreshing in his narrative is the absence of retrospective critical moralizing about assimilation and the remarkable participation of Jews in German culture. Assimilated Jewish aristocrats and intellectuals, even Jews who converted to Christianity, are presented with as much evenhandedness as those Viennese Jewish nationalists and traditionalist theologians whose mistrust of assimilation and acculturation as reliable defenses against prejudice seems to have been vindicated by the Holocaust. The Jews of Vienna in the Age of Franz Joseph is not merely a descriptive history of Viennese Jewry. It vindicates the centrality of Jewishness and anti-Semitism as dynamic and changing forces in the evolution of 19th-century Austro-German politics and culture... Mr. Wistrich’s poignant narrative reminds us that the struggle for civic equality, social acceptance and economic security by the Jews of 19th-century Vienna resulted, among other things, in a steady stream of diverse and unforgettable contributions to art, science and culture... Even if the hopes implicit in the political and social struggle of the Jews of Vienna before 1914 were dashed finally by the violence of Nazism, Mr. Wistrich’s book is a moving reminder of what high hopes they were.” — Leon Botstein, The New York Times Book Review “The excellence of his book lies... in the high quality of scholarship, the sensitivity to nuance, the desire to map the entire Jewish response to the crisis of the empire in all its complexity.” — Michael Ignatieff, New York Review of Books “Will be the standard work for some time to come... eminently readable.” — Peter Pulzer, London Review of Books “[A] monumental book which will be indispensible for a long time to come.” — Ritchie Robertson, German History “Wistrich draws all the strands of this complex story very clearly together... broadly conceived, his book has a compelling dramatic interest and is certain to remain a standard guide to its subject for a long time.” — Roger Morgan, Times Literary Supplement “A paradigm of fine Jewish historical writing and analysis... Wistrich builds his work by exhaustively treating the important trends and figures which Viennese Jewry produced.” — Sharon Fleisher, Jerusalem Post “... a veritable summa of the religious, cultural, and political history in which the Viennese Jews were the main agents of change during the decline of the Habsburg monarchy.” — Victor Karady, Liber
In 1947, Santha Rama Rau went to Japan with her father, India’s ambassador to Tokyo. A year later, she went to China with friends, hitchhiked to remote provinces of the northwest, and traveled through Indo-China and Siam to Indonesia to live for several months in a Balinese village. East of Home is the report of a fascinating trip, full of information about the people of Asia, their customs, theater and dance. It also shows how a young Indian woman, educated in the West, encounters Asia for the first time and discovers herself as an Asian. “A first-rate and deceptively informal account of a recent journey through Asia.” —The New Yorker “An informal and pleasantly engaging book about [Santha Rama Rau’s] travels in the Far East... personal, colored by her acute consciousness of being an Asian among Asians.” — Orville Prescott, The New York Times “A travel book with timely, disturbing moral under-currents, both social and political... so enthralling, so utterly convincing and absorbing that one rebels at turning the last page.” — Boston Herald “Delightful reading... a fascinating adventure story. It also enables one to see Asia as a whole... But its main value lies in the fact that an Asian writes about Asia... an Asian who since she has lived and been educated in the West has the advantages of both points of view. In this age of an Asian renascence Miss Rama Rau’s account is both interesting and vital.” — Saturday Review
At a cocktail party in the 1950s, a businessman said to Frederic Warburg, “You seem to know a lot about publishing. Now tell me, is it a business or an occupation for gentlemen?” This memoir seeks to answer that question. Written in 1959, An Occupation for Gentlemen covers the author’s life until 1939; its sequel, All Authors are Equal, recounts Warburg’s life at the helm of Secker & Warburg until he retired from publishing in 1971. In this first volume, Warburg recounts his school years at Westminster boys’ preparatory school, at Oxford’s Christ Church, and his apprenticeship at Routledge & Sons, which dismissed him because he insisted that the firm should publish fiction in addition to academic books. In 1936, with financial help from his aunt Agnes, Warburg and a partner purchased the publishing firm of Martin Secker. Renamed Secker & Warburg, it became known as anti-fascist and anti-communist, publishing André Gide'sBack from the USSR and George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia. From then on Secker & Warburg published all of Orwell's books and Orwell and Warburg became intimate friends. “An engaging autobiography... Mr. Warburg writes with a nice light touch and with considerable charm and humor. His remarks about publishing are interesting and pointed.” — Orville Prescott, The New York Times “An entertaining and instructive book about two deep and ancient mysteries, human character and the trade of publishing.” — Jacques Barzun “Fredric Warburg’s autobiography is... wonderfully engaging. Mr. Warburg is that rarity among publishers. He writes extremely well.” — Moss Hart
“A highly readable account . . . tracing the future Nobel laureate through his formative years and up to the eve of World War II” (The Wall Street Journal). On the fiftieth anniversary of Hiroshima, Nobel-winning physicist Hans Bethe called on his fellow scientists to stop working on weapons of mass destruction. What drove Bethe, the head of Theoretical Physics at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project, to renounce the weaponry he had once worked so tirelessly to create? That is one of the questions answered by Nuclear Forces, a riveting biography of Bethe’s early life and development as both a scientist and a man of principle. As Silvan Schweber follows Bethe from his childhood in Germany, to laboratories in Italy and England, and on to Cornell University, he shows how these differing environments were reflected in the kind of physics Bethe produced. Many of the young quantum physicists in the 1930s, including Bethe, had Jewish roots, and Schweber considers how Liberal Judaism in Germany helps explain their remarkable contributions. A portrait emerges of a man whose strategy for staying on top of a deeply hierarchical field was to tackle only those problems he knew he could solve. Bethe’s emotional maturation was shaped by his father and by two women of Jewish background: his overly possessive mother and his wife, who would later serve as an ethical touchstone during the turbulent years he spent designing nuclear bombs. Situating Bethe in the context of the various communities where he worked, Schweber provides a full picture of prewar developments in physics that changed the modern world, and of a scientist shaped by the unprecedented moral dilemmas those developments in turn created. Praise for Nuclear Forces “Schweber’s account of Hans Bethe’s life . . . reveals the origins of a charismatic scientist, grounded in the importance of his parents and his Jewish roots . . . [Schweber] recreates the social world that shaped the character of the last of the memorable young scientists who established the field of quantum mechanics.” —Publishers Weekly “Nuclear Forces is a carefully researched, historically and biographically insightful account of the development of a profession and of one of its leading representatives during a century in which physics and physicists played key roles in scientific, cultural, political, and military developments.” —David C. Cassidy, author of A Short History of Physics in the American Century
Published by Knopf in 1946 as an expanded version of a two-part New Yorker article. Joseph Wechsberg and his wife left Czechoslovakia for America in 1938. Sent with the US Army to liberate Europe from the Nazis, Wechsberg returns to Ostrava, the town where he grew up. Searching for his wife's parents, he discovers the devastation of World War II, hears first-hand accounts of its atrocities, witnesses the antics of Red Army soldiers, and remembers his childhood — discovering in the end that home is no longer Ostrava, but California. “[…] a moving, brilliantly written account of [Wechsberg's] return to his home-town, Moravia Ostrava (Maehrisch Ostrau) […]. As in his earlier stories in The New Yorker, almost every ounce of sentiment in Homecoming was set off by an equal measure of irony.” — Richard Plant, The New York Times “A short and very personal book, […] a personal footnote to current European history. […] Affecting and convincing impressions of a shattered world.” — Kirkus Reviews
Chaim Weizmann’s autobiography is a highly personal account of his life in the Zionist movement. Book One, completed in 1941, covers the years 1874-1917 and Book Two covers the years 1918-1948. Weizmann describes the Russian shtetl where he was born in 1874, his schooling in Pinsk and his university studies in Berlin, Geneva and Freiburg (Switzerland) where he received his PhD in chemistry in 1899 before moving to Manchester in 1904. He portrays many leading Zionists such as Theodor Herzl, Achad Ha-am, Max Nordau, Shmarya Levin, Ussishkin, Jabotinsky, Ruppin. He describes the opposition by assimilationist Jews (like Edwin Montagu) to Zionism, and internal debates within the Zionist movement, such as the defeat of Herzl’s Uganda plan — bitterly opposed by Weizmann — at the 6th Zionist Congress (1903) and his frictions with the American Zionists led by Brandeis. Weizmann describes how, during World War I, his work on acetone brought him into contact with British political leaders such as Lloyd George, Arthur Balfour and Winston Churchill and facilitated the Balfour Declaration which, in 1917, paved the way for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”. Weizmann recounts his role in the creation of what would become Israel’s leading scientific institutions, the Hebrew University, the Weizmann Institute of Science and the Technion, including his fundraising efforts in Europe and in the United States on their behalf and for other Zionist initiatives. He became the first President of Israel, and died in office in 1952. “... one of the important historical documents of our time.” — Orville Prescott, The New York Times (January 19, 1949) “[Trial and Error] is likely to be read for many years to come as an authoritative exposition of the Zionist movement ... records eye-witness accounts of so many crucial events and reflects so many deep insights that it is certain to become of permanent value to the scholar and a delight to the general reader.” — Salo Baron, The New York Times (January 23, 1949) “There are four angles from which one can approach this book. One can take it as a history of Zionism during the last seventy years... a record of personal endeavour triumphant over obstacles and dissension... a sad commentary upon human achievement, when eventual triumph comes at a date, and in circumstances, which rob it of its full savour... the self-portrait of a most remarkable man.” — Harold Nicolson, The Observer (March 27, 1949) “Notable in this intellectually candid record is the fact that [Weizmann] embraced and propagated Jewish nationalism because he regarded it as a positive good, not merely a negative escape from gentile persecution. This intensely human book, which in a sense is the story of modern Zionism, constitutes one of the indispensable sources for the history of our times.” — Robert Gale Woolbert, Foreign Affairs (July 1949) “[Weizmann’s] autobiography ... is an astonishingly objective and life-like narrative, without a trace of dramatization, exaggeration, vanity, self-pity, self-justification; it conveys his authentic, richly and evenly developed, autonomous, proud, firmly built, somewhat ironical nature, free from inner conflict, in deep, instinctive harmony with the forces of nature and society, and therefore possessed of natural wisdom, dignity and authority.” — Sir Isaiah Berlin, Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory, Oxford University (November 19, 1957) “Ranks between Churchill’s war memoirs and those of Nehru, Masaryk and Trotzky, among the founders’ own stories ... above all a human book, the record of the experiences and reactions of a man who fought over issues that were important” — Congress Bulletin (April 1949)
Henri Alleg’s candid account of how the French Army brutally tortured him in Algeria first appeared in 1958. Although quickly banned by the French government, it was widely read and remains a classic and powerful indictment of torture. “The lesson of this book... is that we are all on the edge of savagery and if we begin to slip over that edge, we fall fast and far.” — D. W. Brogan, The New York Times “Written with spare and simple candor, the book is much more than a scalding footnote to fever-hot headlines. The Question does not stop with the Algerian question but goes on to ask: What does it mean to be a human being? It tells of the shame and glory of man.” — Time “In his modest, unassuming and precise fashion, Alleg is describing a triumph of the human spirit... The importance of Alleg’s book extends far beyond Algeria and France. For this is what can happen anywhere; what does happen in many parts of the world and what could happen here. There is nothing ‘inhuman’ about it. It is too, too human. To hush it up, to deny it for any reason whatever is to be an accomplice of the torturers...” — Scotsman “[A] noble and in a sense ennobling book, the dominant impression it leaves is one of a progressive and finally an almost total degradation, a degradation both of persons — except for the tortured, the outlawed — and of social institutions. The Question is far more than an account of atrocities, however spectacular.” — The Nation
A sequel to the groundbreaking Children of the Holocaust, Where She Came From is a daughter’s memoir of her mother’s family. Drawing on her journalistic training, Helen Epstein demonstrates how documentary research can unearth family history and bridge the historical chasm of the Shoah. This book is at once a memoir, a family history and a social history of Central European Jews of the 19th and 20th centuries. The three generations of women she portrays are dressmakers; the fashion salon, a refuge and a rare institution where women could speak. “What we so coldly call ‘acculturation’ is a major theme of Helen Epstein’s rich and absorbing new book, Where She Came From. In the guise of a family memoir, she brilliantly evokes Jewish life in the Czech lands... Epstein is unsparing in her examination of the trials of transplantation, and unlike many family biographers, who are in thrall to their characters, she steps out of the frame to observe herself.” —Ruth Gay, New York Times Book Review “In Epstein’s expert and sensitive hands, truth becomes not only stranger than fiction, but more magnetic, wise and powerful.” — Gloria Steinem “Helen Epstein’s literary pilgrimage to her past will enrich our quest for memory and understanding. Written with her superb talent of storytelling, her tale is profoundly human.” — Elie Wiesel
