Books.org participates in affiliate programs including Bookshop.org and the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. We may earn a commission from qualifying purchases made through links on this page, at no additional cost to you.
Overview
This is a personal history of the twentieth century as seen through the eyes of Edith Kurzweil, author, teacher, editor of Partisan Review, and a recent recipient of the National Medal of Humanities. The book opens with Kurzweil early adolescence in Vienna during the Nazi takeover. It ends with the author finding herself in the new century. In between, she kept moving on and interrogating the world around her.
The reader follows Kurzweil on her perilous journey, at the age of fourteen, to Belgium, through France, Spain, and Portugal, alone with her younger brother. Her fantasies of reunion with her parents in New York kept her going but came to naught: she had not expected to fall from a wealthy childhood into the life of the working-class poor, as a millinery apprentice or a diamond cutter. Instead of entering college life, she eventually became a conventional American housewife. Unhappy and anxious, she anticipated the social changes in America, and returned to Europe with her second husband and her two children. She arrived at the beginning of the Italian miracle—its post-war revitalization. In Milan she met many Americans as an active member of its community and of the British-American club. After personal tragedy she returned to New York, and only then pursued her early intellectual ambitions. The author eventually became a professor of sociology and quickly climbed up the academic ladder. Just as she had been as a little girl, she still "wanted to know everything," beginning with her study of Italian entrepreneurs and going on to European history and French thought, to psychoanalysis and anti-Semitism. Her early writings prompted William Phillips, co-founder and editor of Partisan Review, to invite her into the elite circle of New York intellectuals. She worked alongside him, first as a reader, then as executive editor, and took over the editorship of the legendary journal during its final period.
Kurzweil's journey was one of courage, and of emotional and intellectual growth. Full Circle will be of interest to intellectual and cultural historians, literary and Holocaust scholars, and American studies specialists.
Editorials
From the Publisher
"Edith Kurzweil has lived many lives and prevailed against tremendous odds. As an Austrian Jew, she was not meant to live at all; as a first-generation immigrant in America, she wasn't expected to succeed; as a woman, who was also a 1950s-style wife and mother, she was not supposed to become a scholar in her own right. But Kurzweil refused to identify herself as a victim, choosing instead to view adversity as a useful challenge......The real jewel is this book, and the memories and insights it contains."—Phyllis Chesler, Midwest Book Review "[A]n engaging personal memoir.....We have the political history, she supplies a personal history. Kurzweil experiences the Second World War, the Cold War, and the Culture Wars, but what counts here is their effect on an individual existence. She writes skillfully enough to keep the personal story intriguing. However interesting the political moments, the most powerful images in Full Circle emerge from her own life.
—Mark Bauerlein, The New Criterion "This displaced child of Europe lost neither her European savoir faire nor her admiration for those elements of the continent's intellectual tradition that in her academic career she sought to interpret to her adopted countrymen. But in coming to grasp just how alien to American soil were the twin terrors of fascism and Communism, Kurzweil also learned to cling to that soil and to feel it as her own. That course of discovery, or self-discovery, holds a profound lesson for anyone who by accident of birth has been blessed to remain distant from the awful human realities she narrowly escaped.
—Benjamin Balint, Commentary