Last Waltz in Vienna

See Larger Image	List Price: $12.81 Our Price: $12.81 Availability: Usually ships in 2 to 4 weeks Manufacturer: Pan Books Written By: George Clare Average Customer Rating:


Binding: Paperback Dewey Decimal Number: 920 EAN: 9780330490771 ISBN: 033049077X Label: Pan Books Manufacturer: Pan Books Number Of Pages: 322 Publication Date: 2002-06 Publisher: Pan Books Studio: Pan Books
Related Items World of Yesterday Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts Fin-De-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture The Radetzky March (Works of Joseph Roth) Under a Cruel Star: A Life in Prague 1941-1968
Editorial Reviews: On Saturday, February 26, 1938, 17-year-old Georg Klaar took his girlfriend Lisl to his first ball at the Konzerthaus. His family were proudly Austrian. They were also Jewish. Just two weeks later came the Anschluss. A family had been condemned to death by genocide. This new edition of George Clares incredibly affecting account of Nazi brutality towards the Jews includes a previously unpublished post-war letter from his uncle to a friend who had escaped to Scotland. This moving epistle passes on the news of those who had survived and the many who had been arrested, deported, murdered, or left to die in concentration camps, and those who had been orphaned or lost their partners or children. It forms a devastating epilogue to what has been hailed as a classic of holocaust literature.
Spotlight customer reviews: Customer Rating: Summary: A century of a Jewish family until the shoah Comment: This well-written, incisive, and even-handed telling of the author's Klaar family in Austria, 1842-1942, is a fine way to find out about how many Jews entered into the middle classes out of the shetl and worked their way up into the military and civilian ranks. The end of the narrative, when the author becomes a protagonist as he does in the opening pages, really captured my interest much more. I wish Clare had taken more time with his own gripping story rather than so much focus on his predecessors, but this undoubtably is out of humility and respect for his forebears. I cannot tell if the book was written in German and then translated by the same author or if Clare only wrote the German original and the original publisher (Macmillan in London) anonymously translated it into fluid, forceful, and thoughtful English. Perhaps a minor point given the impact of the climax of the tale he tells of his kindred, but I commend him for the effort he put into his work, in the telling and the style both. Also recommended: Charles Fenyvesi's account of how he excavated the roots and found the branches still flourishing of his Hungarian Jewish ancestors over the past 300 years, "When the World Was Whole." More Reviews