They Were Good Germans Once: A Memoir
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In these essays, Toynton remembers her émigré relatives, some of whom left Germany as soon as Hitler came to power, others only escaped later.
Evelyn Toynton’s relatives, German-Jewish refugees all, had grown up thinking of themselves as Germans first and Jews second; her portraits of them, subtly comic when depicting the Germanic traits they retained throughout their lives, take on a tragic poignancy when showing the sorrow they carried: how could their beloved country, so inextricably a part of who they were, have turned on them with such murderous savagery? While some of them embraced their new lives, becoming patriotic citizens of America and England, and one became a Zionist, rising to high office in Ben-Gurion’s government, others went on reading German books, German newspapers; they made nostalgic trips back to Nuremberg, where the family had thrived for centuries before the Nazis claimed it as their symbolic home. But it is the story of Toynton’s refugee mother, of the betrayal and the medical blunder that kept her living in the shadows for fifty years, that is at the emotional heart of this book.
Toynton speaks to a universal immigrant family experience, some embrace a new life, others forge a compromise between their new home and old traditions, while a few never fully find their way.
Evelyn Toynton’s relatives, German-Jewish refugees all, had grown up thinking of themselves as Germans first and Jews second; her portraits of them, subtly comic when depicting the Germanic traits they retained throughout their lives, take on a tragic poignancy when showing the sorrow they carried: how could their beloved country, so inextricably a part of who they were, have turned on them with such murderous savagery? While some of them embraced their new lives, becoming patriotic citizens of America and England, and one became a Zionist, rising to high office in Ben-Gurion’s government, others went on reading German books, German newspapers; they made nostalgic trips back to Nuremberg, where the family had thrived for centuries before the Nazis claimed it as their symbolic home. But it is the story of Toynton’s refugee mother, of the betrayal and the medical blunder that kept her living in the shadows for fifty years, that is at the emotional heart of this book.
Toynton speaks to a universal immigrant family experience, some embrace a new life, others forge a compromise between their new home and old traditions, while a few never fully find their way.
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.