House of Childhood: A Novel

by Anna Mitgutsch

"One of the most important novels of contemporary Austrian literature."-Neue Z?rcher Zeitung Max Berman, a successful but rootless New York restoration architect, socialite, and ladies' man, remembers... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1590511883
• ISBN13: 9781590511886
• Release Date: August 2006
• Publisher: Other Press (NY)
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 1.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 5.9" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

You CAN go home again - but the past is a different country

This is a story of a Jewish boy, raised in an Austrian small town by a well-off family in a beautiful house, until at the age of 5, his parents and their three sons head off to America before the Nazi takeover forces them out. In the new world, his father, formerly a penniless Polish Jew, takes his in-law-paid medical education and drifts away from wife and children, leaving the boy's mother, Mira, severely impoverished, and the children confused. They spiral down into ever-cheaper rooms into, finally, the Bronx. Our narrator is not unhappy there, as he roves the streets and filthy alleys, for he is a true AUGENMENSCH, a person who lives for the visual. He grows up to become a designer, quickly becomes famous amongst the wealthy in NYC,and makes his fortune. He is able to elevate his struggling mother, now long given up hope on life, to a better home, to get his schizophrenic brother into good care, and even to attend to his long-absent, remarried father. He is unable, however,to commit to any woman very long, especially shunning the idea of having offspring. In his 30's he has one true love, but forces her to have an abortion, which ends the relationship. THe usual string of luke-warm loves follows that, until he makes a fateful journey to the suburb of Vienna, called only "H." in the novel, where he becomes obsessed in reclaiming his mother's former home. To do so, he becomes involved in the remnant of the Jewish community still there, the bare trickle of people who came back after the war, if they had survived at all. All his own relatives, approximately 40, were killed one way or another. He finds the Austrian culture alien,and the people of the town potentially all evil, these many years later. The house is occupied, of course, by the daughter of the Nazi official who'd gained the house when his mother's people were kicked out. His is a battle royal to reclaim this house, an Austrian bureaucratic nightmare, not the least of which is proving that his grandparents were truly dead - there are no death certificates, so the title hangs in the air. He chases all over until he gets enough paperwork stamped to prove that they did indeed own that house, and that they did die. He meets a woman, only 23, who is a lost soul, daughter of a Jewish woman and gentile man, whose mother died while young. With her, he has a relationship, and invitees her to NYC. He sets up a scholarship for her to attend a school outside NYC, then slowly during that first semester, she spends more and more of her weekends down in NY with him, hating her school life. When she demands a more stable and real live-in situation, he ends it, as usual. She goes off to succeed as a photographer, eventually to marry a pharmacist and settle down. Now in his 50's, he cannot imagine staying in NYC anylonger - he is fed up, and realizes that he could go to Austria and move in. The legal matters are clear, the Austrian family is forced out, and he moves in. This