They Were Good Germans Once: A Memoir: My Jewish migr Family

by Evelyn Toynton

Overview

"A thoughtful, notable addition to the literature of the Holocaust . . . a poignant memoir." — Kirkus Reviews

In They Were Good Germans Once, Evelyn Toynton speaks to a universal immigrant family experience — some embrace a new life, some forge a compromise between their new home and old traditions, while others never fully find their way.

While Toynton’s father became a hard-working, civic-minded American, with a great sense of obligation to his suburban community, her uncle never stopped feeling like an exile in the US — as soon after World War II as he could, he began making trips back to Germany.

The women in her family also had widely varying relationships to the societies in which they found refuge. One of them, after browbeating a Nazi police chief into having her husband released from Dachau, wound up in England and became a passionate Anglophile; another, a widow deprived of all material comfort and security, retreated into seclusion in her tiny New York apartment, distancing herself from American life and finding solace in her beloved German poets; a fierce Zionist who smuggled guns and money from Europe into Palestine under the noses of the British went on to found a kibbutz and fight for the rights of Arabs as well as Jews.

Then there was the author’s German-born mother, who emigrated to the U.S. only to be struck down by tragedy and forced to live separately from her children, but still found ways to nurture them and provide them with a haven from their sorrows.

Through this series of essays, Toynton remembers her émigré relatives, some of whom left Germany as soon as Hitler came to power, others only escaping much later. Her family lost not only their native homeland and their sense of identity but many of the people they loved. Yet each found ways to give meaning to their lives, whether in their own small circles or in the world at large.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781953002389
Publisher:	Delphinium Books, Incorporated
Publication date:	05/14/2024
Pages:	170
Sales rank:	637,604
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x 0.65(d)

About the Author

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 UniversityPress’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. 

Editorial Reviews

"The author's tone is often elegiac . . . A thoughtful, notable addition to the literature of the Holocaust and those survivors who started anew in America . . . a poignant memoir." — Kirkus Reviews

"This priceless recapturing of darkened history, this lifetime's rumination on family results in a stunningly intelligent and elegantly written work, whose honesty, maturity, perspective, and wisdom are so rare in today's memoirs. I found it utterly engrossing." —Phillip Lopate, author of To Show and to Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction

"Poignant . . . a fascinating memoir."— The Jewish Journal

"Evelyn Toynton’s memoir is a work that foregrounds personal reflection, demonstrating the many ways a memoir can articulate difficult emotions and memories. When the author touches on the experiences of each woman, her writing style is varied and unique. She describes how the women diverged from both German culture and traditional gender expectations. Toynton also explores the ways in which they found liberation despite loss — despite the cruel destruction of the orderly world that their ancestors were promised."—Jewish Book Council

"This book enchanted me in every way. With Toynton's signature intelligence, subtlety and wit, she describes members of her family — deracinated through no fault of their own — in portraits that are by turns surprising, hilarious and heartbreaking. They speak to the punishment of expulsion, the longing for what was left behind, the finality of exile. I shall reread this book at least once a year to remind myself of what a good memoir can be." Lynn Freed, author of The Romance of Elsewhere

"Evelyn Toynton's German Jewish family was one of the lucky ones, who escaped the Holocaust and made it to America. But her tragic, comic, sharply observed memoir shines a brilliant light on their fate, 'marooned for life', as she writes of her uncle, in a strange loneliness. — Carole Angier, author of Speak, Silence: In Search of W.G. Sebald

From the Publisher

2024-03-22
A poignant memoir of displaced German Jews and their struggle to find a home.

“While no one in my grandparents’ or parents’ generation attempted to pass as Gentiles,” writes novelist and biographer Toynton, “their whole culture, their entire sense of their identity, was German.” This self-identification extended in all directions: Apart from an occasional word, they spoke German and not Yiddish; German patriots, they scorned the “peasant” Jews of the Eastern European shtetl, so much so that a friend of the author’s asserted that the German Jews supported Hitler as a bulwark against Bolshevism. Their German world crumbled when Hitler came to power, and Toynton’s parents made their way to America, followed by some survivors who still believed “that Germany was a superior country to every other, perhaps to America most of all.” The author’s sensitive portrayal of these newcomers reveals different ways of contending with the past: the father who often traveled to Germany for business after the war, confident that the Nazis were no more; the uncle who accepted the promise of acculturation only to have it torn away from the Jews, “leaving them with nothing at all.” In that broken promise, Toynton finds reason to repudiate her family’s snobbish rejection of the Ostjuden, which “amounted to a hatred of what we were.” The author’s tone is often elegiac, and some of her episodes are strikingly gaunt; for instance, she hazards, walking among the broken residents of a geriatric home, that each would ask her to kill them if given the chance. Toynton also finds large insights in small incidents, as when, extolling the virtues of LSD, she is brought up short by an aunt who objects to the unearned shortcut to enlightenment.

A thoughtful, notable addition to the literature of the Holocaust and those survivors who started anew in America.

Kirkus Reviews