Review by Booklist Review
The descendant of a prominent publisher who fled the Nazis and a Wehrmacht soldier who didn't investigates his family's history and discovers a tapestry of exile and complicity. Veteran Sports Illustrated journalist Wolff (The Audacity of Hoop, 2016) is the grandson of Kurt Wolff, whose carefully curated Kurt Wolff Verlag published Franz Kafka, Robert Musil, Robert Walser, and Karl Kraus, among illustrious others. Of German-Jewish descent, Kurt had the foresight and the funds to leave the Third Reich in 1933. Eventually, he landed in Greenwich Village, where he started the Pantheon Books imprint. But Kurt's son Niko, the author's father, worked as a truck driver at the Eastern Front and ended up in an American POW camp. Wolff's inquiry focuses upon these two men: gregarious, cultured Kurt, who left many letters but also some secrets, and complex, taciturn Niko, whose inner life was a mystery. In doing so, Wolff reveals a broader fascination with the relationship between historical events and personal trajectories and concern that the charged environment that defined Kurt's and Niko's choices is being replicated in the U.S. today.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Former Sports Illustrated journalist Wolff (The Audacity of Hoop) delivers a poignant portrait of his grandfather, Pantheon Books founder Kurt Wolff, and his own father, Niko Wolff, who served in the German military in WWII despite his Jewish heritage. Kurt Wolff emerges in this account as a bon vivant and something of a womanizer, yet also a man deeply committed to art and culture, who helped to foster the careers of Franz Kafka, Boris Pasternak, and Günter Grass. When Kurt fled Germany in 1933, his son and daughter, both teenagers, stayed with their mother, Kurt's ex-wife and a member of the Merck pharmaceutical family, in Munich. During the war, Niko served as a driver and mechanic for the Luftwaffe. Afterwards, he reunited with his father in America, where he became a successful chemist for DuPont and such a proud U.S. citizen, Wolff writes, "that I never believed he spoke with an accent, even as his friends insisted, he did." Wolff skillfully contextualizes his father and grandfather's tales with military and political history; details links between Merck and the Nazi regime; and uncovers family secrets, including the existence of his father's illegitimate half-brother. History buffs and literary enthusiasts will be rewarded. Agent: Andrew Blauner, Blauner Books. (Mar.)
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Longtime Sports Illustrated writer Wolff (The Audacity of Hoop) presents a dual biography of his grandfather Kurt Wolff (1887--1963) and his father Nikolaus ("Nico") Wolff (1921--2007), whose Jewish heritage uprooted their lives in Nazi Germany. Kurt was a successful publisher who fled Germany in 1933 with his second wife, Helen, and who together escaped to the United States in 1941. Although part Jewish, Nico remained in Germany with his mother and stepfather, becoming a mechanic in Hitler's Wehrmacht. Stories of Kurt fleeing from Nazi-controlled France and Nico's tour on the eastern front are engrossing. Once settled in the U.S., Kurt founded Pantheon Books, while Nico, who joined his father in 1948, earned a Ph.D. in chemistry from Princeton. Both men enjoyed good lives afforded them by U.S. citizenship. The author delves deeply into his ancestry to unravel the complex stories of his multigenerational family, and to show how his father's and grandfather's traumatic lives affected him. The author was drawn to sports as a teen in an attempt to become Americanized in a way Kurt and Nico couldn't. VERDICT Overall, this fascinating, sometimes brutal, and in a few minor instances, rambling narrative will grasp the attention of readers interested in the Holocaust and modern German history.--Karl Helicher, formerly with Upper Merion Twp. Lib., King of Prussia, PA
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Former Sports Illustrated staffer Wolff turns inward with this deeply personal story about family and book publishing. In 2017, the author moved to Berlin for a year to research and chronicle his German family's roots going back to the early 19th century. He wryly reflects that the welcoming journeys his grandfather Kurt and father Nikolaus took to America years ago "stand as a rebuke to the anti-immigrant mood in much of the United States." Book lovers will find Kurt's story especially interesting. In 1912, he was working for a German publisher when he first met a young Franz Kafka and his friend Max Brod. A year later, he used family money and cash raised "by auctioning off parts of his book collection" to buy out the publisher and create Kurt Wolff Verlag, bringing Kafka and Brod along with him. He quickly added Franz Werfel and Rabindranath Tagore, serving as a steward for cutting-edge writing and what he described as the "absolute belief in the authentic word and worth of what you champion." After fighting in World War I, Kurt went on to publish "Émile Zola and Guy de Maupassant, Maxim Gorky and Anton Chekhov, even Sinclair Lewis." Niko was born in 1921. Wolff chronicles in detail how Hitler's rise to power affected many family members, some incarcerated in concentration camps. The atmosphere greatly worried the Jewish publisher of "degenerate" literature. Kurt moved to the U.S. in 1941 while Niko, who served in the army, struggled in harsh postwar Germany before coming to America in 1948. This new phase in the Wolff family story included Kurt's founding of a new press in their "grungy" New York City apartment: Pantheon. With the venture, Kurt hoped "to present to the American public works of lasting value," including those by André Gide, Albert Camus, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Boris Pasternak, and Günter Grass. Wolff concludes with unsettling discoveries about his family's relationships with the Merck pharmaceutical company and the Nazis. An affecting, emotional, and sometimes harrowing saga. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
