About This Book
They were privileged people, cultured and German to the core, a family that had been in Germany three hundred years. But that couldn't save them from Hitler. Some met death in concentration camps, some committed suicide, others escaped only to find themselves just barely tolerated in a war-torn England. From grandmother to grandsons, this clan of emigres will struggle to come to terms with a past replete with large ancestral homes, a present filled with impoverished relatives who have fled the Nazi regime, and a dubious future elsewhere. Karl, the breadwinning father, dreams of an artist's footloose life; his brother, an art dealer, settles on London as home. Their aged mother, Eliza, yearns for the pre-Nazi Germany of her protected youth. Only Julia, Karl's fierce and clear-eyed wife, has her heart set on America as the place to raise her two sons, Benjamin and Jacob, to whom this exciting, brave new world is only an adventure-filled steamship voyage away.
