Hedwig and Berti
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Thirty-five years after publication of her first novel, The Dorp (followed by other works on cooking and gardening), Frieda Arkin returns to the world of fiction to give us another darkly humorous novel, Hedwig and Berti.
Hedwig and Berti is a saga of the totally unlikely marriage of a grandly Teutonic woman, Hedwig Kessler, and her diminutive cousin Berti, two upper-class German Jews forced to leave their homeland during the rise of the Nazis. They flee to London, then to New York City, and from there, finally, to a university town in Kansas. In London, Hedwig gives birth to a daughter whose broodingly dark construction and immense genius for the piano point back in time to the tragedy of her bloodline.
This is a story of prejudice taken to extremes, both within the domain of a severely class-conscious German-Jewish family and beyond it. The characters are subtle, and finely-honed, and their story is told with grace and unexpected humor. Like Penelope Fitzgerald, Frieda Arkin possesses a rare gift for combining love, wit, and dark realism in the reactions and behavior of her characters in the several cultures they are forced to adapt to.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Thirty-five years after the publication of Arkin's first novel, The Dorp, her second follows a family of refugees from Nazi Germany as they flee from Berlin to London and then on to the United States. Valkyrie-like Hedwig, statuesque and commanding, is toting along her most prized possession a trunk full of books documenting the genealogy and achievements of her adored extended family, the Kesslers, who excel at all things artistic, intellectual and athletic at least according to Hedwig. Her husband (and first cousin), Berti, is so retiring and overshadowed by his imposing wife that he fades nearly entirely into the background. All who know the couple are confounded when they produce a dark, elfin changeling of a child daughter Gerda, who develops into a world-class pianist by early adolescence (which does nothing to improve her stormy disposition). The Kesslers move from New York to Kansas while Gerda travels the concert halls of Europe; though they have escaped the ovens at Auschwitz, tragedy catches up with them. While the story starts slowly not much happens until Gerda is old enough to talk the book is infused with the keen ache of loss, the constant bewilderment and defensiveness of the immigrant and the queer charm of odd couple Hedwig and Berti, by turns furiously miserable and delightfully absurd.
