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Jump to navigationJump to searchTales of Loving and Leaving by Gaby Weiner (view source)
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{{infobox infobox1
|title=Tales of Loving and Leaving
|sort=
|date=September 2016
|isbn=1524635081
|amazonukcover=<amazonuk>1524635081</amazonuk> |amazonusaznuk=<amazonus>B01LYA3NE8</amazonus>1524635081|videoaznus=1524635081
}}
It's a fascinating and absorbing book. Weiner notes in her introduction that history is usually told from the point of view of the powerful, or looking at things from the level of an entire country or region. We hear much less often about the individual lives shaped by these great forces. And yet sometimes, these individual stories do more to illustrate the larger forces at work than any analysis of parliaments and elections and arms races. And, in seeking to make sense of a family partly defined by a father who was not often present but who always formed a large presence in his daughter's life, Weiner has given us a story of three lives which can tell us a great deal.
Amalia, Uszer and Steffi led lives shaped by the turmoils of the twentieth century: not just the rise of the Nazis and WW2and the horrors of the Holocaust, but also the Russian Revolution, mass population transfers and the Cold War. It's the story of how three people reacted to forces greater than themselves, how they interacted with the politics and people in the countries they found themselves living in, and how these things affected the relationships they made and how they conducted them. It's fascinating and often very moving.
The writing is clear and elegant and is flavoured both by Weiner's honesty - for example, her jealousy on standing by her father's grave and seeing it was next to the grave of the wife who wasn't her mother - and her compassionate understanding of the flaws and frailties and courage of her family members. I read it in one sitting, fascinated by the careful research and the living of three lives that were so complicated and difficult yet so recognisable in the daily effort of putting one foot in front of the other, despite all the obstacles.
''Tales of Loving and Leaving'' comes recommended by me.
You could also look at [[The Boy on the Wooden Box by Leon Leyson]], a memoir by one of the youngest people on Oskar Schindler's list of Jews saved from the Nazis. Or maybe [[An Exclusive Love by Johanna Adorjan]], in which a granddaughter tries to make sense of the deaths of her grandparents, Hungarian Jews who had lived through the German occupation of Hungary in WW2, then fled to Denmark when the Soviets occupied in 1956.
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