Click to purchase: The Luck of the Weissensteiners
In the sleepy town of Bratislava in 1933 a romantic girl falls for a posteller from Berlin. Greta Weissensteiner, daughter of a Jewish weaver, slowly settles in with the Winkelmeier clan just as the developments in Germany start to make waves in Europe. The political climate in the multifaceted cultural jigsaw puzzle of disintegrating Czechoslovakia becomes more complex and affects relations between the couple and the families.The story follows their lot through the war with its predictable and also its unexpected turns and events and the equally hard times after.From the moment that Greta Weissensteiner enters the posttore where Wilhelm Winkelmeier works, and entrances him with her good looks and serious ways, I was hooked. But this is no ordinary romance; in tact it is not a romance at all, but a powerful, often sad, Holocaust story. What makes The Luck of the Weissensteiners so extraordinary is the chance Christoph Fischer gives his readers to consider the many different people who were never in concentration camps, never in the military, yet who nonetheless had their own indelible Holocaust experiences. Set in the fascinating area of Bratislava, this is a wide-ranging, historically accurate exploration of the connections between social location, personal integrity and, as the title says, luck. I cared about every one of this novel’s characters and continued to think about them long after I’d finished reading.– Andrea Steiner, University of California Santa CruzThe Luck of the Weissensteiners is an epic saga set in wartime Eastern Europe. It follows the lives of two families – one Jewish, one Catholic – and their entwined survival amidst the backdrop of the second world war; first the fascist then the communist invasion and occupation of Slovakia, and the horror of the consequences of war. The reader is transported to a world of deception, fear, distrust and betrayal, alongside enduring love and family drama. The characters are vividly painted in the mind of the reader as we follow their journey across Europe at a time of unimaginable challenge and trauma. Weissensteiners is a magnificent tale of human survival. I wish I hadn’t read it already so that I may repeat the pleasure of discovering and becoming lost in the story once again.(less)
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Summary
Reviewer Name: Paula Rose Michelson “As a Jew who not only read The Diary of Anne Frank, but had the unique opportunity of hearing Mr. Frank speak about those days, and buy this timeless classic from him while he was in Los Angeles during the filming of this movie, I thought I had read and understood about the pre¬war effects on the Jews and the hidden, and sometimes not so hidden, Anti¬Semitism. Yet within the first few chapters, I realized that author Christoph Fischer's historical fiction \"The Luck of the Weissensteiners: The Three Nations Trilogy, Volume 1 \" was more deeply researched than any other fiction, and there have been hundreds, that I read on this time period. Until I read this book, I could not fathom, with AntiSemitism a prevailing reality, how Jews and non-Jews could ever choose to wed, and the horror that ensued when a spouse chose to disavow that union and anything tainted by it to survive. Within this touching story I found the answer and experienced a reality I hadn't since I read Anne Frank's book. Today we are hearing about atrocities throughout the world and statesmen seem to want to perpetuate the myth that doing nothing is really doing something. While reading this heartbreaking story of love, fear, prejudice and betrayal without the usual stereotypes and predictable situations, I was reminded that this is what happens when good people turn their back. For me this fiction was a wakeup call for when a President and Congress look at the dollars and cents of intervention instead of the inhumanity of what is occurring, and I discover that a historical fiction shows us that today's issues are tomorrow's history, a new standard for writers to aspire too has been achieved! Well done!” Paula Rose Michelson is the author of Casa de Naomi: The House of Blessing, Books 1 &2, and the upcoming release of The Naomi Chronicles, Book One, Beginning Anew.