Product Description

Does one ever escape from the family? How much do we understand about our own past? How do we come to be who we are?

Walter Abish, the internationally acclaimed author of How German Is It, examines these questions through the prism of his own experience, and confronts and encapsulates the historic upheavals of the mid-twentieth century in this brilliant, deceptively simple, and quietly wrenching account of his two journeys.
The first begins in Vienna, where Abish was born in the 1930s in the Jewish, but not-too-Jewish, household of a prosperous perfumer. Then it ricochets around the world as his parents flee first to France (his mother had to sneak alone across the Italian border), then to war-torn Shanghai under Japanese occupation, just ahead of Mao’s army, then to Israel.

Incapable of understanding his family’s desperate situation, Abish as a boy creates his own private world, filtering out precarious and terrifying realities.

Abish describes fantastic events in the coolest tones. In precise, haunting detail, he records the perceptions of a child who registers and remembers what he will only later understand. He writes of the day in the park when a stranger suddenly screams “Jews out!” and he and his frail grandmother run for the exit in a panic as the other children and grandmothers stand and watch; the day his father is released by the Gestapo because a man in the room owes him money that he has never tried to collect and says, “Let Abish go—he’s okay”; of the time his father speaks to him about inheriting his perfume business, as they stand on the deck of a ship bound for China.
The first journey recounts the flight; the second journey chronicles the return: Abish writes about how, in the 1980s, he went on a tour to Germany to launch the translation of his award-winning novel How German Is It—a book he wrote without ever having set foot there, deliberately, because he wished to elicit the idea of Germanness in what was “a fantasy of Germany.” This tour of what to him is an unfamiliar society includes a side trip to Vienna, where he glimpses the life he might have experienced and has the horrifying feeling that he never left.
Double Vision is a book that cuts to the quick. With unflinching candor, humor, and affection, Abish re-creates the way it feels to be a child and to look at your parents and wonder who they are. To be an adult and catch them in every corner of your personality. To look back on the world of your youth and realize both what you noticed and what you missed. It is a stunning achievement.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1169541 in Books
• Published on: 2004-02-03
• Released on: 2004-02-03
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 240 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Abish (How German Is It, etc.) intercuts the story of his early years with a modern account of his first visit to Germany and his return to his birth city, Vienna. He was six in 1938 when Hitler annexed Austria and the Jews were expropriated. He remembers a precise number of suitcases being packed at a precise time, with no one explaining why his nicely secular, Jewish bourgeois family was suddenly undesirable. His family fled to Italy and then France before shipping to Shanghai, where they lived until 1948, when the Chinese Red Army forced a move, to Israel. At each stop, Abish watched European Jews recreate their familiar cultural fabric-their preoccupation with ironic repartee, their coffeehouses, even their synagogues for those still inclined to pray. He watched and listened everywhere, almost as if spying on his own life. So, too, in his travel back to Europe, his cultural radar tests the familiar for falseness, looking beneath cultural arrangements for their meaning. Wandering German cities, visiting the concentration camp at Dachau or his former home in Vienna, he's constantly trying to pierce the polite facades of denial by which modern, intellectually fashionable Germans evade the truth of their extermination of the Jews and their continuing anti-Semitism. He insists on complexity, noticing the smallest gesture, the little laugh, the comment not made. What emerges is a sense of how nations construct their identities by very careful editing. To read human history through the lens of one's own life is memoir at its best-and Abish is magnificent.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post

In the early 1980s, a friend of mine, Mark, found himself seated next to a German-Jewish émigré on a flight to San Francisco. The former refugee told Mark a tale of escape and adversity, followed by enterprise and success in California agribusiness. Mark asked him whether he had ever returned to Germany. "Never," came the decided answer. "I could never set foot in that country again, after what the Germans did. I do go to the Salzburg Festival every year; that is different, that is Austria -- but Germany? Never! But you say you are a historian in a college in Cambridge? How marvelous to be a scholar, having the time to read the world's greatest writers: Schiller! Goethe! . . . "

Much has changed in the past two decades. Yet the horror of Germany's past continues to cause agony, not least for German-speaking Jews who escaped the Nazis. Many, like novelist and poet Walter Abish, went on to successful lives in the lands to which they emigrated, and quite a few were able to overcome the ordeal of their personal Germany. Many others, though, never were able to come to terms with their German past enough to reconcile themselves to the German present.

In Double Vision, Abish seems to think that he has not been affected by the distorting trauma of the émigré experience. He professes in this interesting but strangely dissatisfying memoir to be puzzled when Germans accuse him, as a Jew, of letting his experience of the German past prejudice his view of the German present. But shouldn't we take the title of his memoir at its word and look for a double vision -- not be content with what Abish wants us to see but also look for what he shows of himself, willingly or not?

Double Vision is two intertwined memoirs. "The Writer-to-Be" sections describe growing up in Vienna in the 1930s, escaping the Nazis after 1938, exile in Shanghai and life in Israel in the aftermath of independence. "The Writer" is an account of Abish's trips to Germany in the 1980s, after he had written his novel How German Is It, an intriguing, postmodern combination of romantic thriller and disquisition on the German condition, made all the more intriguing by Abish's having written it before he ever set foot in Germany proper.

Both autobiographical strands have their picaresque charm. Abish writes touchingly of his family while conveying the surreal crisis through which he lived as a child and teenager. Also interesting is the description of his encounters with the Germany that he had only imagined before, with the added curiosity that, in a book published in 2004, he's still writing largely from the perspective of the 1980s.

Abish's vision of Germany holds the two memoirs together. He shows how he and his German-Jewish friends in Israel, such as the writer Felix Rosenheim, with a bust of Goethe on his desk, retained a sense of Germanness that survived exile and, regardless of modern Germany, never really changed. Double Vision is more effective as a commentary on How German Is It than on its own. A reader considering the book purely as a memoir is left with a sense of something missing.

Abish's return to his native Vienna lies at the very center, and it is here that the memoir falters, for the author simply cannot face up to the truth about his "familiar" hometown. He insists, as though writing an official Austrian tourist guide, that "Vienna is the very antithesis to Germany" because of its melodious dialect and its mixture of humor and understatement. He writes graphically about the way in which the Viennese welcomed the Nazis in 1938, and yet he does not look further and see just how implicated Vienna and Austria were in the crimes of Germany. Instead he retreats to the Baroque garden of the Belvedere and a discussion of the 18th-century definition of taste. He says of Vienna that "the terror of history didn't lie heavily on this city." He is writing about the Vienna of 1982, before the Waldheim affair unmasked the mendacities and denials that had shaped postwar Austrian identity. Even so, faced with this delusory statement, one cannot help but ask whether Abish just does not want to see beneath the surface, for sentimental, old times' sake.

Abish's memoir lays bare the fraught nature of the Jewish émigré relationship to the Nazi past of Germany and Austria in ways the author cannot perceive. He cannot see modern Germany (or Vienna, for that matter) for what it is, rather than what it was. It is a case of double vision in more senses than one.

Reviewed by Steven Beller

Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

From Booklist
The prizewinning author of How German Is It? (1980) and other fiction tells his personal story here of early childhood in Vienna in an elite Jewish family, escape from the Nazis, growing up in Shanghai during World War II, and his years in Israel as a young army recruit, librarian, and always "writer-to be." In an alternating narrative, he describes his return visit to his birthplace on an author's tour in the 1980s. Abish is so careful not to be melodramatic or self-important that he distances everything with ironic postmodernist comment about writing about writing about becoming a writer. How does a writer-to-be fall in love? Is it more pleasurable to experience love or to write about it? The jumpy, difficult narrative works best in the unforgettable details that capture the young person's bewildered viewpoint as well as the "bizarre incongruities" of the contemporary scene, especially the jovial tourism at the old Nazi sites. "Must we still feel guilt?" a weary German complains. Hazel Rochman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved