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They Were Good Germans Once

A Memoir: My Jewish migr Family

Evelyn Toynton

$39.95

Paperback

Forthcoming
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English
Delphinium Books, Inc
27 August 2025
In these essays, Toynton remembers her migr relatives, some of whom left Germany as soon as Hitler came to power, others only escaped later.

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.

Toynton speaks to a universal immigrant family experience, some embrace a new life, others forge a compromise between their new home and old traditions, while a few never fully find their way.
By:  
Imprint:   Delphinium Books, Inc
Country of Publication:   United States
ISBN:   9781953002563
ISBN 10:   1953002560
Publication Date:  
Audience:   General/trade ,  ELT Advanced
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Forthcoming

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.

Reviews for They Were Good Germans Once: A Memoir: My Jewish migr Family

""The author's tone is often elegiac. . . . A thoughtful, notable addition to the literature of the Holocaust and those survivors who started anew in America. . . a poignant memoir."" —Kirkus Reviews “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 ""Poignant. . .a fascinating memoir.""—The Jewish Journal “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""


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