My Father's Roses - Hardcover

Kohner, Nancy

3.74 out of 5 stars

39 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1605980188 ISBN 13: 9781605980188

Publisher: Pegasus Books, 2009

View all copies of this ISBN edition

1 Used

From US$ 7.00

1 New

From US$ 20.00

One family's extraordinary history―from their heroic feats on the battlefields of WWI to the rise of Hitler and the tragic culmination at Treblinka.

Nancy's father was not like the other fathers in their northern English town. Elegantly dressed after the Eastern European fashion, an impeccable violin player, and never without a rose in his lapel, her father's entire essence alluded to a hidden and haunting past. Delving into the endless boxes of letters and diaries her father carried with him when he fled Czechoslovakia in 1939, her father's past finally comes to life.There are times of joy―her grandparent's finding sanctuary in 1918 in a small town between Prague and the German border; their eldest son returning from the trenches of Verdune and Somme; the birth of their first grandchild; a growing family business. But there was also fear, as instability and danger was the permanent backdrop of their lives, and when Nazi Storm Troopers marched into Podersam, Nancy witness the disintegration of the family through their increasingly desperate letters.Some escape to England, others resort to suicide, while others make poignantly clear that this will be their last letter as they are marched toward Treblinka, in this intimate, heartbreaking, yet ultimately uplifting window into one family's heartache and legacy.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of 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)
Copyright � Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.