Full Circle: A Memoir
This is a personal history of the twentieth century as seen through the eyes of Edith Kurzweil, author, teacher, editor of Partisan Review, and a recent recipient of the National Medal of Humanities. The book opens with Kurzweil early adolescence in Vienna during the Nazi takeover. It ends with the author finding herself in the new century. In between, she kept moving on and interrogating the world around her.\ The reader follows Kurzweil on her perilous journey, at the age of fourteen, to...
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\ From the Publisher"Edith Kurzweil has lived many lives and prevailed against tremendous odds. As an Austrian Jew, she was not meant to live at all; as a first-generation immigrant in America, she wasn't expected to succeed; as a woman, who was also a 1950s-style wife and mother, she was not supposed to become a scholar in her own right. But Kurzweil refused to identify herself as a victim, choosing instead to view adversity as a useful challenge......The real jewel is this book, and the memories and insights it contains."\ —Phyllis Chesler, Midwest Book Review "[A]n engaging personal memoir.....We have the political history, she supplies a personal history. Kurzweil experiences the Second World War, the Cold War, and the Culture Wars, but what counts here is their effect on an individual existence. She writes skillfully enough to keep the personal story intriguing. However interesting the political moments, the most powerful images in Full Circle emerge from her own life.\ —Mark Bauerlein, The New Criterion "This displaced child of Europe lost neither her European savoir faire nor her admiration for those elements of the continent's intellectual tradition that in her academic career she sought to interpret to her adopted countrymen. But in coming to grasp just how alien to American soil were the twin terrors of fascism and Communism, Kurzweil also learned to cling to that soil and to feel it as her own. That course of discovery, or self-discovery, holds a profound lesson for anyone who by accident of birth has been blessed to remain distant from the awful human realities she narrowly escaped.\ —Benjamin Balint, Commentary\ \ \
