In My Mother's House

From Booklist
Growing up Catholic in the Chicago suburbs, Elizabeth wants to get back what her mother, Jenny, seems hell-bent on getting rid of--her faith, her family, her Jewishness. Jenny can't bear to talk about all that, hates it that Elizabeth is dating a Jewish boy (Ezra is such an ugly name) and that Elizabeth told the people at church about her Jewish grandfather's conversion to Catholicism before he escaped from the Nazis in Vienna. But as the mother confronts everything she wants to forget, she remembers her own rage at her father's denial, his desperation to assimilate as an upperclass Austrian scholar to whom Hitler's Kristallnacht was just an embarrassment, "a violent, noisy, anti-Jewish riot." How could her father have left his mother behind when he escaped? It's hard to write about obsession without being, well, repetitive. But as McMullan weaves together the narratives of mother and daughter, she dramatizes their survivor trauma and denial with haunting intensity. And the big questions are rooted in the story: Not where was God, but where was man? Hazel Rochman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


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Leisurely family saga from second-novelist McMullan (When Warhol Was Still Alive, 1994), who dawdles her way through the history of a clan of Austrian refugees. People who survive great tragedies rarely like to talk about them afterward. Here, the case in point is the de Bazsi family, aristocratic Viennese converts to Catholicism (from Judaism) who emigrated just before WWII to England and later to the US. Most of their story is told by Jenny, who was a schoolgirl during the war, in response to the repeated queries by her daughter Elizabeth, who grew up in Mississippi and Illinois. Jenny is a classic Austrian of the old school: devoutly Catholic, educated and cultured, she grew up revering the Hapsburg monarchy and like her parents held Protestant Germans somewhat in disdain. Her father, a factory owner and history professor at the university, was openly anti-fascist, but the family was able to leave in 1938 because the Nazis mistakenly believed that they had high contacts in the Vatican. Elizabeth, like many first-generation Americans, is fascinated by her family￯﾿ﾽs past and wants to dwell on the aspects of it that her parents were happy to leave behind—particularly their original religion, which to her mother￯﾿ﾽs sorrow she has begun to practice with her Jewish boyfriend. The trinkets and heirlooms of their life in the Old World, especially the memoirs of Elizabeth￯﾿ﾽs grandfather and the family silver, become the organizing metaphors of the story, which is narrated in alternate chapters by Jenny and Elizabeth. As in all family sagas, there is a generation gap here: Elizabeth presses for details of the war years and later partly because she understands the era quite differently than hermother does. But, of course, she wasn￯﾿ﾽt there. They make a kind of peace in the end. Rambling and badly organized: an interesting tale that simply spreads itself too thin.


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