MY FATHER’S ROSES

A Jewish family in Czechoslovakia leaves a poignant trail through the turmoil and horror of Europe’s great wars.

The author, who died in 2006 just after finishing this book for publication in the United Kingdom, spent two decades researching it. Her father was a refugee who came to England from the Bohemian town of Podersam in 1939, married the author’s English mother and made a successful career. But he’d retained Old World ways, dressing up for no particular occasion and always with a rosebud in his lapel. He’d been reticent about his background, finally showing concern just as his faculties were slipping before he died in 1987. Then boxes of memorabilia were unearthed among his possessions. “From before the First World War until the end of the Second and beyond,” Kohner writes, “the family must have saved thousands of documents.” She became a self-compelled hostage to this avalanche of information, touched by the intimacy of personal letters trailing back in time. She discovered the threads of the lives of her grandparents, Heinrich and Valerie Kohner, as well as her uncles and aunts. Woven into the narrative are many revelations: The Kohners spoke German and thought of themselves as Germans, not Czechs (Podersam was actually in imperial Austro-Hungary at her father’s birth in 1905). They were straightforwardly Jewish, yet the children hung up stockings on St. Nicholas Day. Uncle Franz fought for Germany as an artillery officer in the World War I and was seriously wounded in Italy; Aunt Berta married a gentile and lost close touch with the family, prompting a depression that led to her suicide. Eventually, the shadow of Hitler’s Germany fell on the Podersam doorstep. Heinrich, the patriarch, died in Prague on the eve of war. For Valerie, the road ended in the gas chamber at the Treblinka death camp. Kohner faces this unthinkable fate with the same empathy and sensitivity she displays throughout toward the family she never knew.

Powerful and tender remembrances etched against history’s monstrous reality.