Volume 29, Number 17 · November 4, 1982
The Making of Canetti
By S.S. Prawer
The Torch in My Ear
by Elias Canetti, translated by Joachim Neugroschel
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 371 pp., $16.50
The first volume of Elias Canetti's autobiography told of his birth, in Bulgaria, into a Sephardic Jewish family and a community where a form of Ladino—Romanisch—was still a living language; his move to England in 1911, when he was six years old; his schooling in Manchester, until his father's shockingly sudden death in 1913, when he migrated to Vienna. There he was confirmed in his love of the German language. He described how he left wartorn Austria to move to neutral Switzerland in 1916, where he was on the whole happy as a schoolboy in Zurich, until 1921, when his formidable mother decided that the time had come to move her family from their Swiss idyll to what she conceived to be the 'real' world.
Review, 4250 words
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