Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
Categories
Memoirs

EVA AND EVE

Julie Metz

This is a riveting, gorgeously written memoir about a woman in search of her enigmatic late mother's lost childhood in Nazi-occupied Austria and the parallels between that dark time and present-day America.

To Julie Metz, her mother, Eve, was the quintessential New Yorker. It was difficult to imagine Eve living anywhere else except the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where she could be found attending Carnegie Hall and the Metropolitan Opera, perusing sales at Fairway Market on 74th Street, or inspecting a round of French triple crème at Zabar's.

In truth, Eve had endured a harrowing childhood in Nazi-occupied Vienna, though she rarely spoke about that time. After her death, Julie discovered a keepsake filled with notes of farewell from friends and relatives addressed to a ten-year-old girl named Eva. Her mother. This was the first clue to the secret pain that Julie's mother had lived through as an immigrant, and it shed light on a family that had to rely on its own perseverance, a sympathetic American Vice Consul, and good luck to escape Vienna.

Beautifully blending personal narrative and family history, Eva and Eve is about Julie Metz's search for her mother's lost childhood and her new identity in America - and how the trajectory of Julie's own life both mimics and resists that of her mother. It is a real-life detective story that offers moments of grace, serendipity, and lessons for this polarized moment when nationalism and xenophobia are resurgent.

Julie Metz is the New York Times bestselling author of Perfection, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Selection. Julie has written on a wide range of women's issues for publications including the New York Times, Salon, The Huffington Post, Redbook, and Glamour. She has been a fellow at Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and The Vermont Studio Center.

Available products
Book Published 2021-04-06 by Atria
Book Published 2021-04-06 by Atria

Comments

Interweaving past and present, blending research and imagination, Julie Metz's memoir crafts a portrait of an elusive mother with a bifurcated life. In her search for the threads of half-told stories and hidden treasures, Metz discovers an absorbingly complex family legacy. An illuminating and textured book.

Upon her mother Eve's death in New York, Julie Metz embarks on a journey to the Vienna of the child Eva, who faced the terror of Nazism. We learn of the emotional connections of this middle-class family to its home and of Julie's complicated relationships with her mother and her own daughter. Using intrepid detective work and inspired imagination, Metz immerses the reader in interwar Jewish life and culture as it intertwined with Viennese society. She skillfully weaves a poignant family history of loss, escape, and refugee life as she evokes the sights, smells, and tastes of her mother's lost childhood.

With a historian's scrupulous research and a novelist's inventive power, Julie Metz has delivered a gripping and moving account of her mother's narrow escape from the Nazis. It is an indelible story of both what was gained and what was lost in the exodus from Vienna to New York.

Three generations of women - grandmother, mother, daughter - illuminate how history is lived and worlds overlap, filtered through families and passed down from one era to the next. Metz writes, with great insight, about how her mother's escape from Nazi-occupied Vienna to New York City - full of unexpected twists and turns - has echoed through her own life and her daughter's, down to the present moment. This journey of discovery and reclamation could hardly be more timely and resonant.

Portuguese (Port.): Casa das Letras/Leya

Eva and Eve maps a wide arc, pulling a Jewish family's past in wartime Vienna into the present era with vivid and dramatic detail. The story of political repression, terror and dissolution, then arrival and retrieval in a new country, is full of astonishing and unlikely twists of fate, showing again that individual destiny may be the greatest mystery of all. Metz's journey to recover the past offers a model for connection and self-understanding - as well as a testament to the strengths of an America that is just and fair to all.

Keeping secrets was a virtue for many in the Silent Generation and they died without ever revealing themselves to their puzzled, frustrated children. With a combination of dogged research and emotional archeology, Julie Metz has uncovered a nearly lost world, and in doing so, she has found the Viennese childhood that formed her mother's character.

Julie Metz's Eva and Eve is a beautifully written ode to her mother who escaped the Nazis as a child in Vienna in 1940. With an artist's eye for detail and a detective's tenacity, Metz brings to life four generations of her family with great sensitivity and intelligence, and offers a timely meditation on political power gone awry.