Afterimages: A Family Memoir
Carol Ascher

Born several weeks after parents’ arrival in the United States, Carol Ascher came of age in Topeka, Kansas, where her father, a Vienna-trained lay analyst, found work among the group of refugee clinicians recruited there for the Menninger Clinic. Growing up, Ascher’s challenge was to reconcile the Midwestern views of her community, the irrepressible optimism of her mother and her mother’s tendency to romanticize her Berlin childhood; and the more sardonic views of her father and his highly cultured émigré circle for whom memory was both illness and cure.

"A moving, compelling, and beautifully written family memoir, Afterimages sheds new and important light on refugee displacement, emigration, and the continuing legacy of the Holocaust for those who come after the event but continue to live in its unending shadow. Carol Ascher, American-born daughter of parents who fled Nazi anti-Semitism from Germany and Austria, takes us along on her fascinating quest to unravel the complex strands of a her family's – especially her father's, the lay psychoanalyst Paul Bergman's - complicated background history in Europe before the war, and the powerful "afterimage" of that history as it affected her and her siblings throughout their lives in the United States . In so doing, and in enmeshing the familial with her own, personal, account of increasing understanding and compassion, she provides us with a poignant book, a second-generation chronicle that offers rich intellectual insights while also stirring our deepest feelings."
—Leo Spitzer, Vernon Professor of History Emeritus, Dartmouth College; author of Hotel Bolivia: The Culture of Memory in a Refuge From Nazism

"Pursuing her story across two continents, from the Midwest of her own childhood to the Europe of her parents’ growing up, Carol Ascher, the daughter of a Viennese psychoanalyst, explores with much psychological insight the unsettling legacy of Nazi persecution on her complicated immigrant family and ultimately on herself, in this probing, well-written memoir."
—Alix Kates Shulman, author of Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen and A Good Enough Daughter