The Times of My Life and My Life with The Times - Softcover

Frankel, Max

 
9780385334983: The Times of My Life and My Life with The Times
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0385334982 ISBN 13: 9780385334983
Verlag: Delta, 2000

Inhaltsangabe

Since 1949, when Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Max Frankel began to write for The New York Times, readers have looked to his work as a lens through which they could witness America's role in a rapidly changing world. In this vivid and unforgettable memoir, Frankel chronicles the times of his extraordinary life as he experienced them...within the context of the news stories that defined an era.

A quintessentially American story, The Times of My Life traces Frankel's riveting personal relationship with history...his harrowing escape from Nazi Germany...his life as an immigrant on the streets of New York...and his extraordinary half-century-long career at The Times. In a rich first-person account that moves from Hitler's Berlin to Cold War Moscow, from Castro's Havana to the newsroom of America's most influential newspaper, this powerful, compelling work interweaves Frankel's personal and professional lives with the era's greatest stories, from Sputnik to the Pentagon Papers to the collapse of the Berlin Wall. And it reveals Frankel's fascinating off-the-record encounters with Nikita Khrushchev, Henry Kissinger, John Kennedy, Richard Nixon, and a host of other history-makers who shaped their times--and ours.


Guiding readers through Hitler's Berlin, Khrushchev's Moscow, Castro's Havana, and the Washington of Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, THE TIMES OF MY LIFE reevaluates the Cold War, and interweaves Frankel's personal and professional life with the greatest stories of the era. -->

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Max Frankel was born in 1930 in Gera, Germany. Raised in New York City, Frankel received his B.A. and M.A. from Columbia University. He has written for The New York Times for fifty years and received the Pulitzer Prize for international coverage in 1973. He served as executive editor of The Times from 1986 to 1994. This is his first book. He lives in New York City.

Aus dem Klappentext

when Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Max Frankel began to write for The New York Times, readers have looked to his work as a lens through which they could witness America's role in a rapidly changing world. In this vivid and unforgettable memoir, Frankel chronicles the times of his extraordinary life as he experienced them...within the context of the news stories that defined an era.

A quintessentially American story, The Times of My Life traces Frankel's riveting personal relationship with history...his harrowing escape from Nazi Germany...his life as an immigrant on the streets of New York...and his extraordinary half-decade-long career at The Times. In a rich first-person account that moves from Hitler's Berlin to Cold War Moscow, from Castro's Havana to the newsroom of America's most influential newspaper, this powerful, compelling work interweaves Frankel's personal and professional lives with the era's greatest stories, from Sputnik to the Pe

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Every time I marveled at the chain of absurd circumstance that plucked us from a town in Nazi Saxony mere moments before the Holocaust and eventually delivered us to the ark America, Mom would scoff, speak a word for God or Fate, and tell me to get on with life. She took pride, of course, in her "world-trotting journalist" and "editor of the Greatest Paper on Earth," but she had no patience for his sense of vainglorious melodrama. "Everybody who got out has got a story to tell," she would say dismissively, never realizing how much she stirred my desire to recount ours.

"Tyrannies We Have Known" was the title I imagined for volume 1, to cover our international adventures: one family's survival of both Hitler and Stalin and my lifelong fascination with the disease of totalitarianism. "Secrets I Have Known and Blown" seemed suitable for volume 2, to recount my newspaper  experiences and recall the scoops, leaks, and hemorrhages of Cold War journalism. To complete the tale, I dreamt of risking a philosophical treatise for volume 3, honoring the plaintive request to Mom from Berlin's commissioner of police in 1940 with the title "Will You Tell Them We're Not All Bad?"--a suitable epitaph for twentieth-century civilization.

My pretentious trilogy will not be written. As Mom tried to teach me, every life is a journey, a narrative in search of meaning. Nonetheless I dredged her memory over the years, and Pop's, and finally my own, for the simple reason that our predicaments conspired to make me a professional witness to the times of my life. A paid teller of stories, I judged my own as worth adding to the many I had already spun.

It is the story of a fugitive, beginning with a desperate pursuit of permits and passports to get our family past the borders of hate and barriers of indifference that defined our times. It describes a search for identity as well as safety, a yearning to belong but also to keep on running, to make a career of my rovings, my outsiderhood.

I escaped into America, and beyond it. The idea of America became my proud passport. A passion to conform made me a patriot. The discovery of words turned me into a skeptic. And the journalist's press pass sent me vaulting across borders to gain a spectacular perspective on our era. Like the astronauts floating in outer space, I've had a rare glimpse of the earth in my times, and it gave me an irrepressible urge to record the journey.

Refugee: 1930-1940

1--Where To?

I was not yet three years old when Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, and I could have become a good little Nazi in his army. I loved the parades; I wept when other kids marched beneath our window without me. But I was ineligible for the Aryan race, the Master Race that Hitler wanted to purify of Jewish blood and other pollutants so that it could rule the world for "a thousand years."

Besides blood, what most defined a person in Hitler's Germany was a passport. But at my age I was ineligible for that as well and had to be inscribed in Mom's. Mutti, I called her, and she and everyone else called me Biba. Like many little boys in Germany, I was nicknamed Bubi but promptly mispronounced it to create the unique identity of Biba. We lived in Weissenfels, a well-scrubbed town in Saxony, near Leipzig, which manufactured shoes, staffed the Leuna chemical works, and served as a minor railroad hub for central Germany. My parents' passports were Polish, not German, although neither spoke Polish and had not lived in Poland since early childhood. Actually, they never lived in "Poland" at all; when Papa and Mutti were born, in 1902 and 1904, Poland had undergone one of its periodic dismemberments. Their native villages, proverbial shtetlach named Busk and Sokal, were dots on the map in a region called Galicia of what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The region became Polish again after World War I, in 1919; it became Soviet at the start of World War II, in 1939, then German, then Soviet, and finally Ukrainian at the end of the Cold War, in 1991. The Jews of Galicia could have amassed a colorful array of passports if only they had survived these permutations.

The Fränkels of Busk and the Katzes of Sokal migrated separately before World War I to the city of Gera in German Thuringia and took apartments in adjoining streets. They came in search of economic opportunity, which they found by buying and selling rags and cheap clothes, but they never lost the stigma of being Ostjuden, Eastern Jews. Even without the ethnic instruction of the Nazis, the German Jews looked down upon the scruffier ones from the East and not infrequently wondered aloud why they didn't go back where they came from. The Ostjuden looked too Jewish and talked too Jewish; they were embarrassing obstacles to the German Jews' "assimilation," which was an exercise more in hiding than in merging. The bent and bearded caricatures of Ostjuden that German Jews carried in their heads looked very much like the pictures the Nazis drew to portray all Jews everywhere.

Still, Papa and Mutti lived easily with these distinctions. They thought of themselves as born in Austria-Hungary and only perversely branded Polish; they felt like Jews and lived like Germans. The quest for their own business took them from Gera to Weissenfels shortly after I was born. The chemical workers promised to be good customers of my grandfather, a peddler, and his son, who dreamed of opening their own dry goods store. There were no major tensions between the 120 Jews and 40,000 Germans of Weissenfels. The Jews were prominent among the merchants, lawyers, and physicians; many of them had assimilated clear into mixed marriages. The fathers of our town's German Jews had fought for Kaiser Wilhelm II in World War I, and they would have fought for Germany again if allowed. We were the only Jews in town who did not possess German citizenship, and our political views were a smidgen less Germanic than those of the rest, but we were respected members of the Jewish congregation and accepted members of the larger society.

Mom often testified that until the Nazis came along anti-Semitism was something her parents talked about only in tales of the old country. In Weissenfels, she said, the most common distinction between Jew and Gentile arose in discussions of servants: people thought a German girl trained in a Jewish household was less desirable--she was "too spoiled."

Fränkel became a well-known name in Weissenfels on New Year's Day in 1933, when it appeared in large letters above the entrance of a store at one corner of the town's main marketplace. The store carried stockings and handkerchiefs, suits, dresses, and some shoes, and on special order it could provide tables, beds, and sofas, even an occasional icebox or piano. Opa Isaak Fränkel, my grandfather, and his energetic son, Jakob, acquired their goods in Leipzig or Berlin, added a modest profit, and delivered wherever you wished. And if the buttons on your suit had to be moved or a dress needed shortening, Jakob's wife, Mary, was at hand a few hours each day with pins in her mouth to make the garment fit. The appeal of the Fränkels lay not only in their cheerful one-stop service but in their apparently trusting nature: they let even 1,000-mark items out of the store with only a small down payment, and, after months of weekly collections, when you were close to settling the debt, they would urge you to take home some other goods with "nothing down." As in his prior peddling enterprise, Pop kept bundles of neat account cards for the installment buyers and used a secret code to brand each one as a good risk, doubtful, or bad. The business was full of promise had Germany not gone berserk.

It was only...

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Verlag
Delta
Erscheinungsdatum
2000
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0385334982
ISBN 13 
9780385334983
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
560
Kontakt zum Hersteller
DELTA
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