Volume 28, Number 3 · March 5, 1981
Growing Up Nazi
By Neal Ascherson
Ghost Waltz
by Ingeborg Day
Viking, 244 pp., $11.95
A Model Childhood
by Christa Wolf
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 407 pp., $17.50
When Ingeborg Day, who lives in New York, had finished the manuscript of this book, she showed it to a Jewish friend. The point of the book is the statement—startling, and in the circumstances courageous—that she has 'a thing about Jews.' She has discovered in herself, deeply buried and for many years unnoticed, a visceral revulsion. The discovery appalls her, and it puzzles her too. She was born in Austria, but she was only four when the Nazi regime collapsed, and her parents never uttered a word about its doctrines afterward. All the same, the gut feeling has turned out to be there, like a hereditary disorder of the blood which makes itself felt only in early middle age. Ingeborg Day wants to find out how this happened, and why.
Review, 3271 words
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