Walking with Ghosts: A Jewish Childhood in Wartime Vienna

ISBN-13: 9780820436920 / Angielski / Miękka / 2000 / 264 str.

Elizabeth Welt Trahan

Opis

During a walk to town, Elizabeth Welt Trahan allows the memories of her childhood to surface after more than a half century - first in short, disconnected snippets but then more and more insistently, until she is pulled back into the nightmarish world of Hitler's Vienna where, being Jewish, she barely survived. But this is also the story of the maturing process of a young girl during those shattering times. Despite an aloof and insensitive father, a circle of friends that is continually decimated by deportations, and the abrupt ending of a timid first love relationship, she is able to draw strength from the trivial and small pleasures of daily living.

Recenzje

"A wonderfully perceptive and detailed 'walk' into the past. Trahan's intelligence and humor create an exceptional picture of Jewish life in Vienna, always under the threat of Gestapo raids and deportations, and seen through the eyes of a young girl growing up." (Geoffrey Hartman, Yale University)
"'Walking with Ghosts' presents a little-known variant on survival in the era of the Holocaust. Elizabeth Trahan describes what it meant to be a teenager living on the edge between legality and illegality in a constantly shrinking group of young people with the same fate and under the threat of death literally to the last minutes of the war. This panorama of a world unknown to many is an unforgettable memoir and an important historical document." (Sigrid Bauschinger, University of Massachusetts)
"The book is very moving, exciting, sad, and yet uplifting, consoling - not only by its happy ending, but also because of its perspective and tone." (Walter H. Sokel, Professor Emeritus, University of Virginia)
"I am reading your book and am impressed and touched..." (Elie Wiesel, Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities, Boston University)
"This autobiographical narrative evokes the complexities, ironies, desperations and long drawn-out sufferings of those who existed at the margins of the Nazi terror - 'foreign Jews' and 'half-Jews' whom the regime trapped more gradually. ...What makes this book valuable is the sober honesty with which it tries to probe the ghosts of the past for a shadow of final truth." (Kristin Herzog, Newsletter, Independent Scholars' Association, North Carolina Triangle)
"This remarkable memoir is an astounding document to round out our knowledge of the Holocaust years by one of a handful of Jews who spent the war years in Vienna and survived. ... The contrast between the sheer youthful desire to live and the reality of danger, war and devastation is rendered simply and perceptively. There is much for the reader to learn about a special time and place and about what it is like to be young." (Erika Bourguignon, The Antioch Review)

O autorze

The Author: Elizabeth Welt Trahan, born in Berlin, Germany, in 1924, lived in Moravská Ostrava, Czechoslovakia, from 1929 to 1939, and in Vienna until her departure for the United States in 1947. With degrees from Sarah Lawrence, Cornell, and Yale, she taught at the universities of Massachusetts and Pittsburgh, the Monterey Institute of International Studies and, until 1993, Amherst College. Her publications include textbooks, translations, studies in German, Russian, and comparative literature, and translation and interpretation methodology. Currently, she is the book review editor of The Independent Scholar. She lives in Amherst, MA.