The Vienna paradox
Subtitle: a memoir
By: by Marjorie Perloff.
Publisher: New Directions Books
Published: 2004
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 283
Subjects: Perloff, Marjorie; Perloff, Marjorie -- Homes and haunts -- Austria -- Vienna; Perloff, Marjorie -- Childhood and youth; Perloff, Marjorie -- Family; English teachers -- United States -- Biography; Refugees, Jewish -- United States -- Biography; Critics -- United States -- Biography; Jewish families -- Austria -- Vienna; Jewish families -- United States; Austrian Americans -- Biography; Vienna (Austria) -- Biography
Genres: Biography.
Description: "The Vienna Paradox is the well-known literary critic Marjorie Perloff's memoir of growing up in pre-World War II Vienna; her escape to America in 1938 with her upper-middle-class, highly cultured, and largely assimilated Jewish family; and her self-transformation from the German-speaking Gabriele Mintz to the English-speaking Marjorie - a new American girl who also happened to be the granddaughter of Richard Schuller, the Austrian foreign minister under Chancellor Dollfuss and a special delegate to the League of Nations. Compelling as the story is, this is hardly a conventional memoir. Rather, The Vienna Paradox interweaves biographical anecdote and family history with speculations on the historical development of early 20th-century Vienna as it was experienced by her parents' generation. Moreover, Perloff explores the lives of these cultivated refugees in a democratic United States that was, and remains, deeply suspicious of perceived "elitism." This is, in other words, an intellectual memoir by one of America's leading thinkers, a narrative in which literary and philosophical reference is as central as the personal."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 265-274) and index.
"A New Directions Book"