Maybe Luck Isn't Just Chance (Jewish Lives) - Hardcover

Liepman, Ruth

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0810112949 ISBN 13: 9780810112940

Publisher: Northwestern University Press, 1998

Synopsis

Born into a middle-class doctor's family, Ruth Lilienstein was raised in Hamburg, studied law, and found herself drawn toward the ideals of the Communist Party. When Hitler came to power she had to flee because of her political activism, not because she was Jewish. She settled in Holland, where she worked for the Swiss consul, continuing vital work helping many refugees getting out of Europe, fix their passports, and hide their families. After the war, she returned to Hamburg and with her husband started one of the most respected literary agencies in the world. A story of a life of commitment, idealism, and courage, Maybe Luck Isn't Just Chance is a compelling and engrossing tale.

About this title

About the Author

Ruth Liepman lives in Zurich.

John A. Broadwin lives in California.

Reviews

Liepman, a prominent European literary agent, recalls her turbulent Holocaust story and her career in this entry in Northwestern's ``Jewish Lives'' series. Born Ruth Lilienstein, the author grew up in a privileged Jewish family. Her father was a physician, the son of Orthodox parents who had rejected religion while closely embracing his Jewish identity. Ruth grew up as a smart, questioning young woman with a ``naive but powerful sense of justice.'' Fueled by her experiences at the excellent but unconventional Lichtwark School, that sense of justice became an understanding of the way the world mistreats some and pampers others. Inevitably, at 19, she joined the German Communist Party and became an active cadre. She took up the study of law as a way of sidestepping her father's expectation that she would join his medical practice, and excelled in that field. But her politics and her Jewishness marked her as an obvious early target of the Nazis. As German historian Inge Marssolek notes in the book's postscript, Lilienstein was one of the first lawyers dismissed by the Nazis on ``political and racial grounds.'' She fled to Amsterdam in 1934, acquired a neutral passport by marrying a sympathetic Swiss, and went to work for the Swiss consulate after the Nazi invasion of the Netherlands, saving many Jews, until circumstance forced her to go underground herself. When the war ended, she returned to Germany, met and married Heinz Liepman, a writer, and eventually ended up running the literary agency that has represented such classics as The Naked and the Dead and Catcher in the Rye in their German markets. Liepman, now 87, tells this dazzling story of intrigue and danger in flat, conversational prose with the faint air of the tape recorder running through it. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Northwestern University Press
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0810112949
• ISBN 13: 9780810112940
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 125