Flamboyant Max Reinhardt was a theatrical revolutionary. A Jewish boy whose father was a corset-maker in Vienna, his wild creative ambitions brought revolving sets and […]
Continue readingCategory: History
Chicken farming to the strains of string quartets in New Jersey
When in Vienna, my grandparents had been middle-class intellectuals; my grandfather a well-paid lawyer, my grandmother a socialist and music-lover. The Second World War put […]
Continue readingA Jewish blessing
My father was 12 when he learned that he was Jewish and that life was no longer safe. Just after the Anschluss, his mother told […]
Continue readingMahler, Freud and me
I based my book “Uncle Otto’s Puppet Theatre” on seven family memoirs, but I also read as much as I could about the Austro-Hungarian Empire. […]
Continue readingEinstein’s helping hand for my refugee family
Albert Einstein must have had hundreds of letters from desperate European Jews asking for help. My grandmother Emma was among those 1930s letter-writers to him […]
Continue readingHow Uncle Otto saw the Nazi leaders
Every evening during the Nuremberg Trials of the Nazi ringleaders, after a day of sketching furiously in the press gallery, my great-uncle Otto Flatter would […]
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