Journey to Nowhere - Hardcover

In the spring of 1939, six-year-old Eva Unger (later Figes) came to settle in London. Born in Berlin, her middle-class Jewish family managed to get out of Nazi Germany, leaving behind friends, relatives and their penniless, orphan housemaid, Edith. Ten years later, with Eva assimilated into post-war British society, word arrived from Edith in Palestine, asking for her old job back in the bosom of the only family she ever knew. At the kitchen table, Edith told the curious schoolgirl Eva of her miraculous survival in wartime Berlin, and her post-war life in the city's ruins, until she was persuaded to go to Palestine. Here she found herself treated with bitter contempt as a despised German Jew, and at the centre of another war, between Arab and Jew.Through Edith's story, Figes argues that continuing anti-Semitism at the end of the century's worst catastrophe led to the creation of Israel. Part memoir, part polemic "Journey to Nowhere" is a highly charged and profoundly moving account of post-war displacement and a fierce attack on America's role in the Middle East.

Eva Figes was born in Berlin, came to England with her family just before the outbreak of the Second World War, and has lived in London ever since. She is the author of fourteen works of fiction, and six works of non-fiction, including the feminist classic, Patriachal Attitudes and Tales of Innocence and Experience.