They Were Good Germans Once: A Memoir

Evelyn Toynton is the author of three novels—Modern Art (published by Delphinium Books, chosen as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year), The Oriental Wife, and Inheritance—as well as a short biography of Jackson Pollock for Yale University Press’s Icons of America series. Among the journals to which she has contributed are The London Review of Books, Harpers, The Atlantic, the TLS, The New York Times Book Review, The Threepenny Review, Salmagundi, and numerous anthologies. For the past twenty-five years, she has lived in England, on the North Norfolk coast.

"The author's tone is often elegiac . . . A thoughtful, notable addition to the literature of the Holocaust and those survivors who started anew in America . . . a poignant memoir." — Kirkus Reviews"This priceless recapturing of darkened history, this lifetime's rumination on family results in a stunningly intelligent and elegantly written work, whose honesty, maturity, perspective, and wisdom are so rare in today's memoirs. I found it utterly engrossing." —Phillip Lopate, author of To Show and to Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction"Poignant . . . a fascinating memoir."— The Jewish Journal"Evelyn Toynton’s memoir is a work that foregrounds personal reflection, demonstrating the many ways a memoir can articulate difficult emotions and memories. When the author touches on the experiences of each woman, her writing style is varied and unique. She describes how the women diverged from both German culture and traditional gender expectations. Toynton also explores the ways in which they found liberation despite loss — despite the cruel destruction of the orderly world that their ancestors were promised."—Jewish Book Council"This book enchanted me in every way. With Toynton's signature intelligence, subtlety and wit, she describes members of her family — deracinated through no fault of their own — in portraits that are by turns surprising, hilarious and heartbreaking. They speak to the punishment of expulsion, the longing for what was left behind, the finality of exile. I shall reread this book at least once a year to remind myself of what a good memoir can be." Lynn Freed, author of The Romance of Elsewhere"Evelyn Toynton's German Jewish family was one of the lucky ones, who escaped the Holocaust and made it to America. But her tragic, comic, sharply observed memoir shines a brilliant light on their fate, 'marooned for life', as she writes of her uncle, in a strange loneliness. — Carole Angier, author of Speak, Silence: In Search of W.G. Sebald