"We wear Aran Sweaters and Lederhosen. We are forbidden from speaking English. We are trapped in a language war. We are the Speckled People." In one of the most original memoirs to emerge in years, Hugo Hamilton tells the haunting story of his German-Irish childhood in 1950s Dublin. His Gaelic-speaking, Irish nationalist father rules the home with tyranny, while his German-speaking mother rescues her children with cakes and stories of her own struggle against Nazi Germany. Out on the streets of Dublin is another country, where they are taunted as Nazis and subjected to a mock Nuremberg...
"We wear Aran Sweaters and Lederhosen. We are forbidden from speaking English. We are trapped in a language war. We are the Speckled People." In on...
As a boy, Hugo Hamilton felt a strong desire to be rid of the confused identity he had inherited from his German mother and Irish father. Yet history's determined grip tightened its hold. A job at the harbor, rather than offering him respite, entangled him in a bitter feud between two fishermen--one Catholic, one Protestant. Against the background of the spiraling Troubles in the North, Hugo listened to the missing persons bulletins going out on the radio for his German cousin who mysteriously vanished somewhere on the west coast of Ireland and watched as the unfolding harbor duel moved...
As a boy, Hugo Hamilton felt a strong desire to be rid of the confused identity he had inherited from his German mother and Irish father. Yet histo...
The childhood world of Hugo Hamilton is a confused place. His father, a brutal Irish nationalist, demands his children speak Gaelic at home whilst his mother, a softly spoken German emigrant who escaped Nazi Germany at the beginning of the war, encourages them to speak German. All Hugo wants to do is speak English. English is, after all, what the other children in Dublin speak. English is what they use when they hunt down Hugo (or Eichmann as they dub him) in the streets of Dublin, and English is what they use when they bring him to trial and execute him at a mock seaside court. Out of this...
The childhood world of Hugo Hamilton is a confused place. His father, a brutal Irish nationalist, demands his children speak Gaelic at home whilst his...
