Nobody's son
Subtitle: a memoir
By: Mark Slouka
Edition: First edition.
Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company
Published: 2016
Language: eng
Number of pages: 274
ISBN-13: 9780393292305
Subjects: Family secrets; Mothers and sons; Czech Americans; Biography; Family; Childhood and youth; American Authors
Description: "For readers of W.G. Sebald and Daniel Mendelsohn, by a writer whose storytelling is 'devastatingly agile' (New York Times Book Review). Born in Czechoslovakia, Mark Slouka's parents survived the Nazis only to be forced to then escape the Communist purges after the war. Smuggled out of their own country, the newlyweds joined a tide of refugees moving from Innsbruck to Sydney to New York, dragging with them a history of blood and betrayal that their son would be born into. From World War I to the present, Slouka pieces together a remarkable story of refugees and war, displacement and denial, admitting into evidence memories, dreams, stories, the lies we inherit and the lies we tell -- in an attempt to reach his mother, the figure at the center of the labyrinth. Her story -- the revelation of her life-long burden and the forty-year love affair that might have saved her -- shows the way out of the maze"--