I felt that I had a duty towards these forebears, and that I wanted to take up the challenge of conveying what it meant to be this particular Jewish family. Over the years I realised that they contained rare insights into a whole historical period, from life in the Jewish quarter of a town in Moravia, in what is now the Czech Republic, to life in Vienna at the turn of the 20th century, on to the Anschluss and after. Then the others came into my hands in various ways. My father gave me the first set of these memoirs, saying without conviction ‘you may be interested in this’. It turned out that my family was highly literate, wrote poems, performed plays, and loved to write. The other reason I wrote the book is that I had the rare privilege of owning seven family memoirs. As any journalist knows, you only know a story when you’ve written it. Writing the book didn’t help me discover an identity, but it allowed me to put into words – and that’s the business I am in – a story I had always felt belonged to others and had now made my own. We never knew three of our grandparents, and the fourth, our paternal grandmother, lived far away in Vineland, New Jersey. As a result, my sister and I were neither French, nor English, nor Jewish, nor Catholic, nor anything really. My highly romantic mother wasn’t Jewish, but she espoused causes and ideals, and took us to live in Israel. She and my father settled in Geneva, as two young people without family nearby.Īs for the Jewish side of things, my father who was Jewish didn’t feel Jewish because he hadn’t been brought up in that tradition. My mother was Irish, and left London as a very young woman because she felt stifled there. His mother-tongue was German, his passport was American, he settled in France after my parents’ marriage broke up, and married a French woman, and then another. My father was born in Vienna but left with his parents when the Nazis marched in, and so lived the life of an exile. The first was that I had always felt rootless, as had my parents themselves. Q: Why did you decide to write this book about your family, and what impact did writing it have on you? This is a story of rare immediacy that touches on themes of loss, identity and choice. Like a faded snapshot, it recalls carefree days before the world changed. The cardboard-and-watercolour puppet theatre of the title was put together in Vienna in 1932 by the author’s great-uncle Otto as a family game. This family saga is based on seven testimonies by members of the immediate family circle. The survivors’ children and grandchildren are today scattered across Europe, the US and Canada. Yet they were also ordinary people with all the familiar doubts, worries, talents, ambitions and vanities … Some felt Jewish, others less so but all were forced to do so. They were intellectually curious and some of them very accomplished. The Flatters and the Graumanns were comfortably off without being wealthy. Uncle Otto’s Puppet Theatre is the extraordinary story of one family, from the impoverished Czech countryside of the 1860s to imperial Vienna, and from Nazi-era Vienna, Prague and Brno to post-war America. A tale for our times, a story of exile, rebuilt lives, loss and identity.
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