The Memory of All That: George Gershwin, Kay Swift, and My Family's Legacy of Infidelities

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More About This Book

Overview

The Memory of All That is Katharine Weber’s memoir of her extraordinary family. 

Her maternal grandmother, Kay Swift, was known both for her own music (she was the first woman to compose the score to a hit Broadway show, Fine and Dandy) and for her ten-year romance with George Gershwin. Their love affair began during Swift’s marriage to James Paul Warburg, the multitalented banker and economist who advised (and feuded with) FDR. Weber creates an intriguing and intimate group portrait of the renowned Warburg family, from her great-great-uncle, the eccentric art historian Aby Warburg, whose madness inspired modern theories of iconography, to her great-grandfather Paul M. Warburg, the architect of the Federal Reserve System whose unheeded warnings about the stock-market crash of 1929 made him “the Cassandra of Wall Street.” 

As she throws new light on her beloved grandmother’s life and many amours, Weber also considers the role the psychoanalyst Gregory Zilboorg played in her family history, along with the ways the Warburg family has been as celebrated for its accomplishments as it has been vilified over the years by countless conspiracy theorists (from Henry Ford to Louis Farrakhan), who labeled Paul Warburg the ringleader of the so-called international Jewish banking conspiracy. 

Her mother, Andrea Swift Warburg, married Sidney Kaufman, but their unlikely union, Weber believes, was a direct consequence of George Gershwin’s looming presence in the Warburg family. A notorious womanizer, Weber’s father was a peripatetic filmmaker who made propaganda and training films for the OSS during World War II before producing the first movie with smells, the regrettable flop that was AromaRama. He was as much an enigma to his daughter as he was to the FBI, which had him under surveillance for more than forty years, and even noted Katharine’s birth in a memo to J. Edgar Hoover.

Colorful, evocative, insightful, and very funny, The Memory of All That is an enthralling look at a tremendously influential—and highly eccentric—family, as well as a consideration of how their stories, with their myriad layers of truth and fiction, have both provoked and influenced one of our most prodigiously gifted writers.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly
Novelist Weber (Triangle) here paints a wry and engaging portrait of a powerful, talented, but troubled family. She relays memories of her father, Sidney Kaufman, a self-mythologizing filmmaker, and Andrea Swift, her self-absorbed mother, who retreated into photography and Angela Thirkell novels, and weaves them into her familial history: on her father's side, refugees from Russia and Eastern Europe; on her mother's, the German-Jewish Warburg banking dynasty. While the affair between her maternal grandmother, composer Kay Swift, and George Gershwin takes center stage (Weber's title derives from an Ira Gershwin lyric), Weber packs in other celebrated names related by blood or association. The most touching passages describe the impact of unavailable adults on Weber (she was left alone for five days on a film set) and Weber's relationship with Swift, who took her to Broadway shows, Central Park, and Schrafft's soda fountain. (July)
Library Journal
Novelist Weber (True Confections) is the granddaughter of Broadway composer Kay Swift (1897–1993), who was married to banker James Warburg and had a romantic liaison with George Gershwin. Weber considers her family history to examine how the past affects the present. Much of the book concerns the author's dysfunctional relationships with her father, Sidney Kaufman, and mother, Andrea Warburg. Along the way, Weber describes a host of eccentric characters, from Zero Mostel to Ezra Pound, and her discovery of the past through FBI files on her father. Of special interest is Weber's account of Swift, whom she feels was unfairly accused (first by Warburg after their divorce) of an amoral Roaring Twenties sexual promiscuity. Gershwin, whose affair with Swift had repercussions in the author's life, looms over her memories. The lack of faithfulness in family relations, sexual and otherwise, was a source of pain that Weber strove for years to overcome—apparently successfully. VERDICT A thoroughly engaging family memoir. Readers interested in George Gershwin or Kay Swift (consider also Vicki Ohl's Fine and Dandy) will be particularly interested in this book. [See Prepub Alert, 1/17/11.]—Bruce R. Schueneman, Texas A&M Univ. Lib., Kingsville
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Kirkus Reviews

In this debut memoir, novelist Weber (True Confections, 2009, etc.) tells the story of her colorful family and the scandalous—but monumentally transformative—love affair between her grandmother, Kay Swift and George Gershwin.

"Growing up, I missed George Gershwin without ever knowing him, because two people I loved, my mother and grandmother, loved him and missed him," writes the author. Swift was the Protestant wife of James Paul Warburg, scion of a distinguished Jewish family of bankers. A gifted musician, she knew brief success as the songwriter for the 1930 smash Broadway hit, "Fine and Dandy." But where she earned her greatest notoriety was as Gershwin's longtime lover and most ardent defender of the Gershwin musical legacy. The book often reads like a who's who of the New York high society that Andrea Swift Warburg, Swift's gentle, but tragically child-like daughter, eschewed through marriage. Warburg's husband, Sidney Kaufman, was a social-climbing womanizer whose primary allure was a passing resemblance to Gershwin. "Born in the back of a grocery store in Brooklyn to immigrant parents," his sole claim to fame was as the purveyor of Aromarama, a technique that wed film scenes to odors. As Weber acerbically remarks, "Most of my father's movie career took place at the intersection of making it and making it up." The book is strongest in its rich details of a dazzling but painful family past fraught with betrayals, infidelities and other assorted dysfunctions, including—in the figure of art historian Aby Warburg—mental illness. However, Weber is overly reliant on historical narrative to convey a very personal recollection, which creates an unintentionally brittle objectivity that makes it difficult for readers to connect with either Weber or her account, except at a distance.

Illuminating but often dry.

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780307395887
  • Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
  • Publication date: 7/19/2011
  • Pages: 288
  • Sales rank: 176,223
  • Product dimensions: 5.80 (w) x 8.30 (h) x 1.10 (d)

Meet the Author

Katharine Weber is the author of the novels True Confections, Triangle, The Little Women, The Music Lesson, and Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear. She lives in Connecticut with her husband, the cultural historian Nicholas Fox Weber.

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