Alexander Wolff

Endpapers: A Family Story of Books, War, Escape, and Home by Alexander Wolff was part history, part memoir, part warning. Wolff's family history is a fascinating look at the early 20th century from his ties to famous publisher Kurt Wolff, responsible for publishing Kafka and starting Pantheon Books after emigrating to the United States, and the Merck pharmaceutical company that may have supplied drugs to Hitler and certainly used slave labor supplied by the Nazis. He father, Niko, did not leave Germany with his father and served in the Wehrmacht throughout the way despite having some Jewish blood.

Wolff, who spent his career writing for Sports Illustrated, takes a journalistic approach to his family history, using primary sources including family letters to create a detailed timeline. He uses that foundation to move between the lives of his grandfather and father, weaving in the stories of other family members, both legitimate and illegitimate, who experienced both sides of the war.

I enjoyed the book with its ties to publishing and history as well as its exploration of the complexity of our personal relationships to the past.… (mehr)