MEMOIR / EUROPEAN HISTORY

Afterimages:

A Family Memoir

"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

"It is a moving, ultimately courageous story, but often not very pretty. While her trips to Vienna to see her father's family home, to research his work and visit her grandfather's grave lent no magic resolutions, Ascher notes that she did make peace with a country that had long held ugly, fearful impressions. 'That was an enormous gift to myself.'

And in the end, while Ascher realizes she can't perhaps ever truly understand her father, she comes to some kind of resolution with the not knowing. 'It isn't a perfect resolution,'she admits. 'Maybe there can never be one when a relationship is so fraught.'"
—Judith Linscott, Compass

"A story of growing up in refuge from one of the most brutal dictators of the 20th century, Afterimages: A Family Memoir is the collective memories of a family who grew up in Topeka, Kansas after their parents fled Hitler's Germany in fear. Author Carol Ascher reflects on her bright-eyed to a fault mother who always told her about better days back in the old country, and the dark sense of humor of her father, whose work in pyschlogy only made it darker. Afterimages is a unique story, shedding light on those Germans who did not agree with Hitler's policies and left the country to escape his tyranny."
— Midwest Book Review

"Ascher’s book is focused on family, and yet her story is the story of many people displaced by war uprooted in ambition and dream, dispersed all over a world that does not always accept or appreciate them. At the end of her memoir, Ascher writes about leaving her father’s grave, listening to the music he loved so much---Rossini, Beethoven, Bach, Boccherini---all 'rich as bittersweet chocolate, satiating yet leaving that terrible hunger and regret'(p.223). Her memoir is just as bittersweet with hunger and regret, just as rich. In writing it, she helps us understand her family, but also the many European/Jewish families who became a part of Kansas and the Midwest during World War II."
— Thomas Fox Averill, Kansas History  (Autumn 2008)