Pushing Time Away : My Grandfather and the Tragedy of Jewish Vienna

From Booklist
Singer, a philosopher, bioethicist, professor, and author of 16 books, is best known for the "animal liberation" movement, which deals with the ethics of our treatment of animals. He also is the grandson of David Oppenheim, a Jew and a classical scholar who lived in Vienna and died in Theresienstadt concentration camp in 1942. Oppenheim's wife, Amalie, survived the Holocaust and moved to Australia in 1946. Singer found many letters and intimate personal papers in an aunt's home in Australia and in the State Archives of Austria. They included more than 100 letters that Singer's grandparents wrote to his parents and to his mother's sister after they left for Australia in 1938. Singer describes how his grandfather became a friend of Sigmund Freud and how they discussed theories of psychology. Oppenheim later parted with Freud, following instead the first of the great heretics of psychoanalysis, Alfred Adler. Singer's book is an exceptional eulogy to his grandfather. George Cohen
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Book Description

"What binds us pushes time away" wrote David Oppenheim to his future wife, Amalie Pollak, on March 24, 1905. Oppenheim, classical scholar, collaborator, then critic of Sigmund Freud, and friend and supporter of Alfred Adler, lived through the heights and depths of Vienna's twentieth-century intellectual and cultural history. He perished in obscurity at a Nazi concentration camp in 1943, separated from family and friends, leaving his grandson, the philosopher Peter Singer, without a chance to know him.

Almost fifty years later Peter Singer set out to explore the life of the grandfather he never knew, and found a scholar whose ideas on ethics and human nature often parallel his own writings. Drawing on a wealth of documents and personal letters, Singer made startling discoveries about his grandparents' early romantic attachments, the basis on which they decide to marry, their professional aspirations, and their differing views of Judaism. An essay that Oppenheim co-wrote with Freud, but which was suppressed because of a bitter split within Freud's psychoanalytical society, leads Singer to explore the difficulties of following one's own ideas in the circles of both Freud and Adler.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"What binds us pushes time away," wrote David Oppenheim to his future wife, Amalie Pollak, on March 24, 1905. Oppenheim, classical scholar, collaborator and then critic of Sigmund Freud, and friend and supporter of Alfred Adler, lived through the heights and depths of Vienna's twentieth-century intellectual and cultural history. He perished in obscurity at a Nazi concentration camp in 1943. More than fifty years later, philosopher Peter Singer set out to explore the life of the grandfather he never knew. Combining touching family biography with thoughtful reflection on both personal and public questions we face today, Pushing Time Away captures critical moments in Europe's transition from Belle Epoque to the Great War, to the rise of Fascism, and the coming of World War II.

FROM THE CRITICS

The Washington Post

Pushing Time Away is largely a biography, but it is also at times an intensely personal memoir of Singer's feelings about his family and its past, and about the tragedies and ironies that this past touched on. Although Singer is historically well informed, he does not attempt to provide a comprehensive accounting of his grandfather's life, the society in which he was raised or the philosophical and ideological context in which he worked; to paraphrase his grandfather's own distinctions, Singer is interested not in explaining David Oppenheim but in understanding him. There are thus long passages of personal reflection in which Singer compares his experiences with those of his ancestor and tries to identify with him, while always retaining the clarity and skepticism of the trained philosopher. He does this, by the way, in exquisitely lucid prose, and few books of this sort can have been as clearly and thus as beautifully written. — Steven Beller

The New Yorker

David Oppenheim was a classical scholar, a member of Freud's inner circle, and a close friend of the psychoanalyst Alfred Adler. He was also a victim of the Holocaust, and until his grandson, the philosopher Peter Singer, discovered a trove of his letters and writings, his life had been almost completely forgotten. Singer reconstructs that life in fascinating detail. He illuminates the complexities of his grandparents' difficult but successful marriage, evokes the vibrant and disputatious life of early-twentieth-century Vienna, and offers a convincing picture of the intellectual and personal battles that dominated the early days of psychoanalysis. Singer's moving book, haunted from the beginning by its terrible end, constitutes a revolt against the anonymity of the Holocaust's grim statistics.

Publishers Weekly

The renowned and controversial Princeton philosopher Singer (a leading proponent of animal rights) presents here a portrait of his grandfather, David Oppenheim, an accomplished classicist, occasional collaborator with Freud and long-standing participant in Viennese psychoanalytic circles. In an aunt's attic in Melbourne, Singer found a trove of letters from Oppenheim to Singer's grandmother Amalie Pollak, and then went searching for additional documentation in the Austrian archives and for his grandfather's surviving students. After a slow start, the result is an altogether engrossing, multilevel journey. Singer richly recaptures the sparkling intellectual and social life, and the ultimate tragedy, of Viennese Jews. He also uses the history to reflect upon his own philosophical commitments, which he does always with an appropriately light touch, complementing, never overshadowing, the drama of his grandparents' story. The homoerotic relations that both his grandfather and grandmother pursued become an occasion for Singer to ponder the ancient world's tolerance of sexual diversity. Oppenheim's letters and other documentation provide a fascinating, insider's view of Freud's circle in the early years of psychoanalytical theory. Freud's tyrannical treatment of those with differing viewpoints, including Oppenheim, leads Singer to reflect upon the meaning of free intellectual inquiry. The last chapters are riveting and sad-Austria's Anschluss with Nazi Germany in 1938, the illusion that life can somehow go on, the departure of the children to Australia, the desperate efforts from faraway Melbourne to wrench the parents from a world collapsing upon them. Written with intellectual breadth and accessible prose, Singer's book could find a wide readership. Agent, Kathy Robbins. (Mar.) Copyright 2003 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews