Reading Claudius: A Memoir in Two Parts

In Reading Claudius, Heller recreates her parents' journey from the cafe/salon life of culture, literature, and love in pre-war Prague, through the war years in Germany, and forward to their post-war family lives in the US. The narrative, which flows like a well-paced novel, is built on a solid foundation of letters, diaries, and interviews. Literary, cultural and philosophical themes are woven skillfully throughout this gripping story.I have read a lot about the Holocaust and WWII, but never have I had such a clear and intimate look at the life and culture of the pre-war intellectual communities such as this one in Prague. This cafe/salon society included a rich gathering of musicians, philosophers, writers, physicians and artists. Heller brings this period, and her parents circle in particular, into sharp focus. I can taste the chocolate cake slices, smell the strong coffees, hear the poetry readings and the late night philosophical discussions that search for meaning in an orderless world. I can see the young lovers as they swim in a nearby lake on a hot Sunday afternoon, and feel their tension as news and events from beyond their cloistered world begin to intrude.As "A Memoir in Two Parts", the book also includes Heller's own intimate story as the daughter of Holocaust survivors coming of age in suburban Chicago in the 1950's and 60's. Besides being a wonderful book to read (I couldn't put it down), Reading Claudius is an important book that captures a moment in history that is now gone, but that we must not forget.

Personal memoirs are often interesting, but rarely inspiring. Somehow, and quite remarkably, Caroline Heller has managed in Reading Claudius to achieve both. By adroitly weaving together the emotional and physical journeys of her family and her from pre-WWII Europe to present day America, the author has brought not only the tumultuous and often terrifying times but the participants themselves to life. It is a history, it is a love story, it is a memoir, and, ultimately, it is one of the most compelling, beautiful stories or perhaps pair of stories I have read in some time. Through her use of personal memory and painstaking research, Ms. Heller presents us with a story-line that is riveting and characters whom we come to know and care about deeply. The result is a work, lovingly yet honestly told, that rings true and remains authentic throughout. Kudos to Caroline Heller for sharing her family and their inspirational journey with all of us.

This amazing true story kept me spellbound all the way through. Author Caroline Heller meticulously penned each chapter using information gleaned from her family during the Nazi infiltration into Germany.The two-part book begins well before the author was born, and ends before the death of her father, who lived into his nineties. The day he received his doctor's degree from college he was captured and held for five years in a Nazi death camp during which time he was instructed to take care of medical patients according to Nazi instructions. It was a gruesome, heart-rending ordeal, during which time he himself became ill and was near death when suddenly news reporters were allowed to come into the prisons and ask for information. When they discovered that Paul Heller was a doctor, they interviewed him. They told him the Russians had broken through and the Nazis were being arrested and prisoners would soon be freed.Paul himself was hospitalized for some time and it was several more years before he could get a visa to meet up with his family and friends. Finally he was able to propose to and marry the woman he had secretly loved nearly his whole life. The couple made their home in the United States and had two children. Part two of the book tells the story of their children, and how they were affected by the Nazi regime, even though the parents never talked about it until much later in life. My heart-felt thanks to Caroline Heller for sharing her story of iron will, love and redemption with the rest of us.

I was a student of Erich Heller's - one of the three people featured in this memoir - and ordered the book because although he had an enormous impact on me, I always found him very mysterious. Caroline Heller, his niece, helped me understand some of Heller - and also that aspect of myself that found him so powerfully attractive - for the first time. Her evocation of his youth, his traumatic escape, and then his academic career is sensitive and perceptive; yet she doesn't look away from less palatable aspects of his character.In short, she made Heller real to me in a way he couldn't have been when I was a nineteen year old undergraduate. She helped me understand what I could only, as a young student, intuit. So while for many readers of this fine memoir the holocaust and its impact on survivors will be the focus, for me it was about tracing the difficult path of a brilliant post-Romantic thinker.In my own career as a professor, I've often pondered the strange alchemy that generates great teachers of the humanities. I've always found this quotation from William Arrowsmith wise, and whenever I read it I think of Heller:"[The] humanities are largely Dionysiac or Titanic; they cannot be wholly grasped by the intellect; they must be suffered, felt, seen. This inexpressible turmoil of our animal emotional life is an experience of other chaos matched by our own chaos. We see the form and order not as pure and abstract but as something emerged from chaos, something which has suffered into being. The humanities are always caught up in the actual chaos of living, and they also emerge from that chaos. If they touch us at all, they touch us totally, for they speak to what we are too."

Excellent

This is not a book I ever ordered or received. Gord

Too much literary jargon