The Exiles Return: A Novel
Readers of Edmund de Waal’s gripping Jewish family history, The Hare with Amber Eyes (2010), will remember his brilliant, courageous grandmother, born Elisabeth von Ephrussi (1899–1991). A lawyer steeped in economics and philosophy, Elisabeth wrote poetry and, during the late 1950s, five novels, including this never-before-published, incisive, and tragic tale of bombarded and morally decimated postwar Vienna. In his foreword, Edmund explains that the novel is “profoundly autobiographical,” though Elisabeth cleverly covers her tracks. As the story begins, the paralyzed city is reluctantly repatriating Jewish exiles who fled the Nazis. Professor Kuno Adler returns to his old laboratory, where he confronts a “self-confessed, unrepentant Nazi.” Sent to stay with her aunt in the bucolic Austrian countryside, beautiful and diffident Marie-Theres, the American daughter of an exiled princess, is inextricably drawn into the decadent intrigues of Vienna’s elite. De Waal’s acid, eyewitness drama of malignant prejudice, innocence betrayed, the disintegration of the old order, and love transcendent has the same jolting immediacy as the novels of Iréne Némorisky as well as deeply archetypal dimensions. Another de Waal triumph of illumination. --Donna Seaman