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55
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
49/100Critics
60/100Scholars
Author:
Alexander Wolff
Publisher:
Atlantic Monthly Press
Date:
March 2, 2021
A grandson of the influential German-American book publisher Kurt Wolffâwho founded Pantheon BooksâSports Illustrated journalist Alexander Wolff investigates his fraught family history, offering a sweeping portrait of the turmoil of the 20th century and the legacy of immigration from Nazi Germany.
What The Reviewers Say
... [a] revelatory, riveting, and deeply moving account of his family’s involvement in Germany’s recent history.
Now, having looked more deeply into that Germanness, the author is left with layers of ambiguities—“Kurt and Helen’s flight and exile, Maria and Elisabeth’s fate to be ‘rats in a trap,’ Niko’s service on two fronts.” In contemporary Berlin, where the Nazis’ victims are memorialized in the very pavement, Alexander Wolff exposes in his ancestors’ experiences the common thread. It is the barest, most basic definition of purpose in life, neither noble nor subhuman: survival..
... an event-filled biography and, along the way, a captivating case study in the challenges faced by refugees attempting to remake a life.
Ultimately the real energy of Endpapers comes not from Wolff’s impressive reconstruction of his father and grandfather’s biographies, but from the way he adds himself to the narrative, bringing us back to the present.
