Asylum, Moriz Scheyer
Asylum, Moriz Scheyer
List: $27.99 | Sale: $19.59
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Asylum
A Survivor's Flight from Nazi-Occupied Vienna Through Wartime France

Author: Moriz Scheyer, P. N. Singer

Narrator: Robert Blumenfeld

Unabridged: 9 hr 54 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 09/27/2016

Includes: Bonus Material Bonus Material Included


Synopsis

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.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Maureen on February 28, 2017

This should be required reading for everyone and for all ages. During the beginning stages of the Holocaust (specifically during the Anschluss in the late 30s) there were many jokes told among Jews in an attempt at some sort of humor in the face of a bleak situation. In his recently-published memoir,......more

Goodreads review by Stefanie on August 20, 2022

Moriz Scheyer was born in 1886 in Romania. The family had moved to Vienna while Moriz was still attending school. He was in secondary school at the outbreak of World War I, and wrote about that and the aftermath of the war. He avoided service in that war, due to a health condition. Between the wars,......more

Goodreads review by Harry on July 02, 2023

3.5 STARS This book gave a great insight into the life of a Jewish person during WW2 and the daily fear they went through, also found it interesting to read about a Jewish person living in France as this was a welcome change from the usual survivor stories normally based around someone who lived thr......more

Goodreads review by Rena on January 01, 2019

I feel bad about only giving this book three stars. I DID like it, but...well, it was a non-professional person's journal, so the writing style didn't engross me. But it was invaluable in that it reveals the actual views of a Jew during WWII and Hitler's reign. I was touched by the author's vehemenc......more

Goodreads review by Rennie on July 11, 2017

Viennese author Moriz Scheyer completed his memoir of being wrenched from his life as an editor and critic for a major newspaper in Vienna and hiding out in France even before World War II had ended. Considering that, it’s incredible that he had so much perspective about what was going on in the war......more


Quotes

"'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

"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

"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