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Asylum: A Survivor's Flight from Nazi-Occupied Vienna Through Wartime France Audiobook
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Publisher Description
A recently discovered account of an Austrian Jewish writer's flight, persecution, and clandestine life in wartime France.
As arts editor for one of Vienna's principal newspapers, Moriz Scheyer knew many of the city's foremost artists, and was an important literary journalist. With the advent of the Nazis he was forced from both job and home. In 1943, in hiding in France, Scheyer began drafting what was to become this book.
Tracing events from the Anschluss in Vienna, through life in Paris and unoccupied France, including a period in a French concentration camp, contact with the Resistance, and clandestine life in a convent caring for mentally disabled women, he gives an extraordinarily vivid account of the events and experience of persecution.
After Scheyer's death in 1949, his stepson, disliking the book's anti-German rhetoric, destroyed the manuscript. Or thought he did. Recently, a carbon copy was found in the family's attic by P.N. Singer, Scheyer's step-grandson, who has translated and provided an epilogue.
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"Scheyer's account of his struggle for survival as a foreign Jew under Vichy, largely written while still in hiding, is propelled by the raw passion of righteous anger. His nuanced picture of wartime France, with its collaborators and resisters, vividly underscores the power of ordinary human kindness in the face of supreme evil."
— Thomas Ertman, New York University, author of Birth of the Leviathan
Quotes
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“‘Try to understand me,’ Moriz Scheyer begs the future readers of his memoir in 1944. And we do, leaving it drained, but exhilarated by the description of how he roamed an unfriendly Europe, stateless. With the publication of this mesmerizing book, his search for asylum might just be over.”
— Ronald C. Rosbottom, Amherst College, author of When Paris Went Dark -
“A chilling reminder of the fragility of life in a world gone mad, and a record of the generosity of spirit and courage of people…Shocking, heartbreaking, but hugely inspiring.”
— Susan Ottaway, author of A Cool and Lonely Courage -
'Try to understand me,' Moriz Scheyer begs the future readers of his memoir in 1944. And we do, leaving it drained, but exhilarated by the description of how he roamed an unfriendly Europe, stateless. With the publication of this mesmerizing book, his search for asylum might just be over.
— Ronald C. Rosbottom, Amherst College, author of When Paris Went Dark -
Moriz Scheyer's gripping account of survival under Nazi rule is both a chilling reminder of the fragility of life in a world gone mad, and a record of the generosity of spirit and courage of people who hardly knew him but risked everything to save him. Shocking, heartbreaking, but hugely inspiring.
— Susan Ottaway, author of A Cool and Lonely Courage -
A well-written book full of desperate hope, intense fear, and a demand for vigilance against the mentality of hate.
— Kirkus Reviews -
His prose is unembellished - direct and simple, like that of Ernest Hemingway".—Winnipeg Free Press
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About the Authors
Moriz Scheyer (1886–1949) was arts editor of one of Vienna’s main newspapers from 1924 until his expulsion in 1938. A personal friend of Stefan Zweig, in his own lifetime he published three books of travel writing, and three volumes of literary-historical essays. He died in France in 1949.
P. N. Singer is Mortiz Scheyer’s step-grandson, a writer, and translator.
About the Narrators
Robert Blumenfeld has recorded over two hundred audio books during his lengthy career. His theater credits include Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde, Othello, and The Purified Prince. His television and film credits include As the World Turns, Sesame Street, Une Femme Ou Deux, and The Awful Truth. He is also the recipient of the 1999 Alexander Scourby Talking Book Narrator of the Year Award and the 1977 Special Tony Award from the National Theatre of the Deaf.
Peter Ganim, an Earphones Award–winning narrator, is an American actor who has appeared on stage, on television, and in film. He has performed voice-over work since 1994.