About the Book
While Evelyn Toynton’s father became a hard-working, civic-minded American, with a great sense of obligation to his suburban community, her uncle never stopped feeling like an exile in the US; as soon after World War II as he could, he began making trips back to Germany. The women in her family also had widely varying relationships to the societies in which they found refuge. One of them, after browbeating a Nazi police chief into having her husband released from Dachau, wound up in England and became a passionate Anglophile; another, a widow deprived of all material comfort and security, retreated into seclusion in her tiny New York apartment, distancing herself from American life and finding solace in her beloved German poets. A fierce Zionist who smuggled guns and money from Europe into Palestine under the noses of the British went on to found a kibbutz and fight for the rights of Arabs as well as Jews. Then there was the author’s German-born mother, who emigrated to the U.S. only to be struck down by tragedy and forced to live separately from her children, but still found ways to nurture them and provide them with a haven from their sorrows. All of them had lost not only their native homeland and their sense of identity but many of the people they loved. Yet each found ways to give meaning to their lives, whether in their own small circles or in the larger world.
Praise for They Were Good Germans Once
This priceless recapturing of darkened history, this lifetime’s rumination on family results in a stunningly intelligent and elegantly written work, whose honesty, maturity, perspective and wisdom are so rare in today’s memoirs. I found it utterly engrossing.
—Phillip Lopate, author of To Show and to Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction
This book enchanted me in every way. With Toynton’s signature intelligence, subtlety and wit, she describes members of her family — deracinated through no fault of their own — in portraits that are by turns surprising, hilarious and heartbreaking. They speak to the punishment of expulsion, the longing for what was left behind, the finality of exile. I shall reread this book at least once a year to remind myself of what a good memoir can be.
—Lynn Freed, author of The Romance of Elsewhere
Evelyn Toynton’s German Jewish family was one of the lucky ones, who escaped the Holocaust and made it to America. But her tragic, comic, sharply observed memoir shines a brilliant light on their fate, ‘marooned for life’, as she writes of her uncle, in a strange loneliness.
—Carole Angier, author of Speak, Silence: In Search of W.G. Sebald
Praise for Evelyn Toynton
Inheritance: With rich literary allusions, Toynton delivers a classic story set in Thatcher’s England. Themes of parental legacy, lost innocence, the impermanence of life, DNA versus nurture, and illusion versus reality wrap vine-like around evocative locales and vivid characters.
—Booklist, starred review
Jackson Pollock: Toynton’s sensitive and incisive book sorts through the wreckage of an imagination out of which so much of contemporary art would go on to assemble itself.
—Times Literary Supplement
The Oriental Wife: How much reality can you take? That’s a question I think you have to ask yourself before opening Evelyn Toynton’s fine, mordant new book…the emotional high points seem to leap from the page… sentence by sentence, superior fiction.
—Alan Cheuse, All Things Considered, NPR
Modern Art: Toynton… maintains a steady hold on the reader’s attention… her prose is sharp, uncluttered by needless adornment, even elegant—an increasingly rare phenomenon… her perceptions seem sharp and fresh.
—Francine Prose, New York Times Book Review
About the Author
Evelyn Toynton is the author of three novels — Modern Art (published by Delphinium Books, chosen as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year); The Oriental Wife; and Inheritance – as well as a short biography of Jackson Pollock for Yale University Press’s Icons of America series. Among the journals to which she has contributed are The London Review of Books, Harpers, The Atlantic, the TLS, The New York Times Book Review, The Threepenny Review, Salmagundi, and numerous anthologies. For the past twenty-five years, she has lived in England, on the North Norfolk coast.
Author website: www.evelyntoynton.com