My Father's Roses - Softcover

Kohner, Nancy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0340960264 ISBN 13: 9780340960264

Publisher: Hodder Paperbacks, 2009

Synopsis

Some families save and others throw away. The Kohners, a Jewish family living in Bohemia at the end of the nineteenth century, threw very little away. A hundred years later their casually assembled archive of over a thousand family letters, hundreds of photos, diaries and notebooks, pieces of verse, invoices, tickets and programmes, tells a unique story.

Like most families, they are as concerned with their own affairs as with world events. Two parents, Heinrich and Valerie and their three children, Franz, Berta and Rudi, write to each other about what matters to them most - a compelling story of love and rivalry, arguments and reconciliations, business, money-making and home.

As history overtakes them, their ordinary lives collide with extraordinary world events. In 1939, Hitler's invasion destroys the world in which they have lived and loved.

Decades later, Rudi's daughter, Nancy Kohner, goes through the archive of letters and diaries and began to reflect on what it means to inherit such a story - words from a lost world. Captivated, amused and often surprised by what she uncovered, in My Father's Roses she revisited, with extraordinarily moving tenderness, her relationship with her father and, through him, a family she never knew.

About this title

About the Author

Nancy Kohner spent two decades piecing together her family's history from the suitcases of diaries, letters, and photographs her father brought out of Prague before her death in 2006.

From Publishers Weekly

Kohner, born in England in 1950, grew up with little understanding of her father's earlier life as a Jewish refugee from Czechoslovakia. After his 1987 death, she went through the correspondence, diaries, photographs and other documents he brought from Prague, which spurred her into two decades of research to reconstruct his story. Her odyssey resulted in this poignant portrait of three generations. Many family letters illuminate the narrative, which begins in 1896, when her grandparents met, and ends in the early 1940s, with her 64-year-old grandmother Valerie in Nazi-occupied Prague, writing letters to her sons, aware of her impending doom: We lived such a beautiful, peaceful life. It's a good thing that no one can take away our memories. In 1942, Valerie arrived at the Treblinka death camp. Kohler (who died in 2006) provides an evocative, moving but unsentimental book that captures the commonplace details of ordinary lives torn apart by the darkening cloud of world events. (Jan. 15)
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Edition details

• Publisher: Hodder Paperbacks
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0340960264
• ISBN 13: 9780340960264
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 368