Runaway Waltz: A Memoir from Vienna to New York - Hardcover

Morton, Frederic

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0743225392 ISBN 13: 9780743225397

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2005

Synopsis

The revered Austrian author of Thunder at Twilight recounts his childhood idolatry of Fred Astaire, his family's forced immigration to New York City on the eve of World War II, and his subsequent achievements as a writer. 17,500 first printing.

About this title

From Publishers Weekly:

The author of two National Book Award winners (The Rothschilds and A Nervous Splendor), Viennese-born Fred Morton started life as Fritz Mandelbaum, his name Americanized once his family, fleeing the Nazis, began a tentative new life in New York City. In this deeply sentimental and slightly smug memoir, Morton charts his rise from obscurity to fame: from his teenage idolization of fellow Austrian-American immigrant Fred Astaire, to the tedium of a summer job as a Manhattan baker's assistant; his youthful encounter with the sneeringly patronizing Vladimir Nabokov; his emergence as a successful journalist and writer, interviewing Thomas Mann and spending Christmas with the Rothschilds; to his feelings of alienation and emotional vulnerability among high society at an elite skiing lodge. Throughout Morton evokes his loving, dignified family as his emotional touchstone, a family that remained distinctly Viennese despite their best efforts to Americanize. The other touchstone is his wife, Marcia, although Morton's writing about her can be cloying and idealized. While Morton's professional remembrances are full of anecdotal and incidental detail, his limpid, stoic voice is overly formal and distant. His memoir suffers from an overall flatness, neither successfully representing the people around him nor compellingly evoking the layered consciousness of past selves.
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About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0743225392
• ISBN 13: 9780743225397
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 224