Impossible Love: Ascher Levy's Longing for Germany - Softcover

Frister, Roman

4.21

14 ratings by Goodreads

9780753817063: Impossible Love: Ascher Levy's Longing for Germany

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0753817063 ISBN 13: 9780753817063

Publisher: Phoenix, 2003

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This book is a grand epic in which Roman Frister reconstructs the real-life story of the Levy family to produce a unique portrait of a Jewish family swept along in the rise and fall of German history. We follow them through the hard times and the happier ones, in business and in their personal lives. As history is interwoven with Frister's interpretation of the Levy family's experiences, this intellectually engaging book—in truth a historical document—reads like an epic novel.

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From the Inside Flap:

An old cardboard suitcase found in a flea market in Jaffa was the inspiration for this remarkable family biography. Stuffed full of hundreds of documents, from upholsterers' bills to a World War One certificate awarding the Iron Cross for bravery, it revealed the amazingly colourful history of the Levy family - at one time one of the richest and most respected Jewish families in Pomerania.

Beginning with these scraps of paper Roman Frister managed to trace the remaining relatives and slowly piece together the lives of five generations. What emerges is a compelling account of a Jewish family swept up in the changing historical, political and social developments in Pomerania, Prussia and finally in the German Reich. A unique and yet archetypal story of the rise and destruction of German Jewry; of the search for a compromise between German patriotism and Jewish identity and a key to the love affair that bound German Jews to their homeland - the 'Impossible Love' of the title.

There are good times as well as bad, when their businesses thrived, when they were finally allowed to serve on the Town Council - proper citizens at last. Then dismay, turning to despair as they see everything they have worked so hard for being slowly but methodically taken away. The narrative travels from a small 19th-century village to 1940s New York, from Jerusalem through Berlin to Switzerland, finishing only with the end of the Levy family's residence in Germany. Like an epic novel it is full of coincidences, minor miracles and horrifying scenes. But as Frister puts it himself:

'I have invented nothing. Reality turns out to be more fascinating and yet also more terrible than any product of the imagination.'

ILLUSTRATED

�20 price in UK only Roman Frister was born in 1928 in Bielsko, Poland. A teenager during the Second World War, he survived concentration camps and death marches. After the war he worked as a journalist in Poland until he was arrested by the Communist authorities. In 1957 he emigrated to Israel where for many years he was editor of the leading Israeli paper Ha'aretz. In 1990 he became the director of the school of journalism in Tel Aviv, Koteret. His books, both fiction and non-fiction have been translated into several languages and his remarkable memoir - The Cap or the Price of a Life - was a huge best-seller in Germany, Poland and Israel.

From the Back Cover:

A documentary account as gripping as any novel - the history of the Jewish family Levy and their 'impossible love' for Germany.

'Roman Frister is a master of the written word, a magician who produces powerful images.' German Radio

It is a unique and yet archetypal story of the rise and destruction of German Jewry; of the search for a compromise between German patriotism and Jewish identity; of the impossible love that bound the German Jews to their homeland.

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