{"product_id":"the-way-home-isbn-9781400076062","title":"The Way Home","description":"Growing up in Bavaria during World War II, Ernestine Bradley came to know wartime dislocations and food shortages, along with the challenges of taking care of her siblings while her mother was ill. The men of her hometown were away at war, but their absence created an exciting unexpected freedom–a freedom she sought again at 21 when she became a stewardess, moved to New York and went on to marry a shy basketball star who played for the New York Knicks.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eYet the paradoxes of her childhood shaped Bradley’s life. Her hard-won discipline helped her maintain a full-time career as a professor while she commuted weekly to Washington and her husband’s public life; and Germany’s literary response to the holocaust of which she had been unaware became her scholarly passion. Cancer confronted her with a personal war, ultimately demanding a vulnerability she had never allowed herself. Frank, warm, and deeply moving, \u003ci\u003eThe Way Home\u003c\/i\u003e is an inspiring American story.“A memoir of self-discovery. . . . Lucid and bracing.”  \u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“An unforgettable portrait of a German wartime childhood. . . . Moving seamlessly between a child’s memories and an adult’s perspective, Ernestine Bradley involves the reader at every step along the way.” \u003cbr\u003e—Doris Kearns Goodwin, author of \u003ci\u003eNo Ordinary Time\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“Elegant. . . . Sets a lofty standard for introspective memoir.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Philadelphia Inquirer\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\"A smart, engaging memoir.\" —\u003ci\u003eMore\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“Dazzling. . . . Bradley's stirring tale of obstacles overcome, goals pursued, and sacrifices made explores how one woman forged a rewarding life on her own terms.\" —\u003ci\u003eBooklist\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003eErnestine Bradley, a naturalized American citizen, is a professor of comparative literature, an author, a mother, a grandmother, a breast cancer survivor and the wife of former Democratic presidential candidate Bill Bradley. She currently teaches at New School University in New York City and lives in New Jersey.I was born in Passau, which is now on the Austrian border, in 1935.  Passau is a city of three rivers—die Dreiflüsse-Stadt. It is mentioned  in the Nibelungenlied, the German epic poem written around 1200, but  its origins date back roughly fifteen hundred years. Here I spent the  first ten years of my life. The picturesque old town, the Altstadt,  with its Italianate buildings, is set on hills high above the  confluence of the Danube, Inn, and Ilz rivers. It also sits on top of  formidable walls, constructed over centuries to defy the periodic  floods, and its heart is laced with tunnels, steep steps, and narrow  alleys—a child’s dream landscape, where you could play hide-and-seek  all day long. (During the war there were practically no vehicles in the  streets.) Street names like Hennengasse (Hens’ Alley) and Löwengrube  (Lions’ Den) suggested a magical past, and the high, narrow buildings  created canyons that promised protection.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe Danube was, for us kids, the least interesting of Passau’s rivers.  It had a harbor, or perhaps it was just a long, extended boat-landing,  where ships coming down from Regensburg or up from Vienna docked. The  dockworkers would yell at us and chase us away, but there was nothing  to do there anyway, except watch the loading and unloading. In former  times (so we were told), boats would come from as far away as Budapest  and the Black Sea. It all sounded very mysterious: I had no idea why  those boats no longer arrived. In the 1980s, my nephew, who was then a  student at the University of Passau, invited me to ride out into the  countryside. Not far from town, he stopped before a huge boulder  overgrown with ivy. You had to push the ivy aside to see a plaque  commemorating an Aussenlager; it was a subsidiary of the Mauthausen  concentration camp, which itself was located about eighty miles down  the Danube from Passau. This subcamp was small—it never contained more  than a hundred people—but what went on there? When I asked my mother  about the camp many years later, she gave me the usual answer: she did  not know.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNot even that the area was closed off and nobody was allowed to go near  it? Well, yes, that of course one knew, since one was not allowed to go  there.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhat do you think was going on there? One didn’t know, precisely  because one was not allowed to go near the place. And nobody ever  really went? Not to her knowledge. Could you venture a guess? Perhaps  they built secret things. Who built them? Prisoners. What kind of  prisoners? Prisoners, political prisoners, those who opposed the  regime. And what about the Jews? She did not know.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe Inn River was my river, perhaps because we lived in the Innstadt,  the section of town wedged between the Inn River and the  Mariahilfsberg, a mountain rising behind the river. Overlooking the  Innstadt, perched on top of the mountain, was a famous pilgrims’  church, Mariahilf, which gave the mountain its name. It was an  attractive building, the outside walls washed in a Baroque yellow, with  white accents and carved stone masonry surrounding the windows and  doors. Leading up to it on one side of the mountain, opposite the  roadway where in winter we went sleigh-riding, was a covered passage  with perhaps three hundred wide stone steps, where pilgrims would  ascend, saying prayers on each step. When there was a drought or some  other calamity, long processions of farmers came from miles around to  appeal to Mary, Mother of God, praying, “Maria, hilf!,” carrying  banners and fingering the beads of their rosaries as they walked. I  watched them from a window of our apartment as they walked by, making  their way up to the church, barefoot all the way.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMy “Tante Betty” (not an actual relative but a person I loved dearly)  had a grandson, Gerhardi, with Down syndrome. On several occasions she  prayed an entire rosary on each of the steps leading to the church at  the top of the mountain and would have to spend the night on the steps,  because she could not finish all her prayers in one day. Only much  later, after her death, did I realize that Gerhardi had been a prime  target for the euthanasia program the Nazis launched in 1939, and that  her prayers had a very specific purpose. Gerhardi survived because in  August 1941 Bishop Galen of Münster preached a single sermon against  the euthanasia program, and the killings were stopped—at least  officially. How often have I wondered what would have happened if  Bishop Galen or someone of similar authority had spoken out against the  deportation of the Jews, who were neighbors, German citizens. Most  Germans were opposed to the euthanasia program, since it was directed  against members of their own families, and the bishop knew he spoke for  the majority when he condemned it. The Jews, a minority, had no such  advocates. Even so, in 1943, when the gentile wives of Jewish men who  had been sent to the camps staged a weeklong protest in Berlin at the  Rosenstrasse—under constant threat of being shot at—they were  successful: the men were released. How often would the Nazis have caved  in when faced with convincing public protest?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn late spring, the Inn River would swell with snowmelt from the Alps  and often carried Hochwasser (“high water”). The floodings of Passau  occur regularly; there are high-water marks on the outside of many  houses, and inside, damp cavernous hallways lead from ground floors to  the safe upper floors. Sometimes when you walked across the Inn Bridge,  you were drenched by the spray and you could feel the bridge swerve. It  was exciting. Several months after one particular Hochwasser, there  appeared a gravel island in the river, toward the Innstadt side and  separated from the Innstadt by a deep and fast current. It was early  summer. I was eight years old, and our little gang decided to jump from  the bridge into the river and swim to the new island. The Inn is a  swift river at all times. A little downstream, past where the Inn  emptied into the Danube, a ferry went back and forth on a cable, and  the river was so strong that it once tore the ferry from the cable.  Rumor had it that people drowned. We jumped; we swam; we landed on the  gravel island a long way downstream from the bridge. Neighbors,  acquaintances, somebody must have told my mother. Obviously, she was  very angry with me and took me to “Opapa,” her husband’s father, who  flourished his cane and said he would thrash me with it if I ever  jumped again. The threat of a beating did not scare me, and I could not  understand why everybody got so upset about something that had been so  much fun—but I never jumped into the Inn again.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOpapa’s son, my mother’s husband, was Baumeister Max, the proprietor—or  the son of the proprietor—of the hair salon where she worked. (In  Bavaria it is customary to refer to a person by his or her last name  first, followed by the given name, a custom that may be a vestige of  the importance attached to family identity rather than to the  individual. The name of my mother’s first husband forever rings in this  reverse sequence in my ears, and I will keep it that way.) Baumeister  Max loved my mother, and with enormous gallantry had married her after  she became pregnant with me by the man she was in love with but felt  she could not marry. She often told me, with a slight bitterness in her  voice, that a week after I was born she was picked up from the lying-in  hospital—elegantly, by taxicab—and went right back to work at the  Baumeister salon; as the owner’s wife, she felt this was expected of  her. So, upon coming home from the hospital, I was immediately given  into day-and-night care with Tante Betty. Tante Betty became the most  important person in Passau for me. It was she who invented my nickname,  Wuschi, and she tied a string to my cradle with the other end attached  to her foot, so that when I cried during the night she did not have to  get out of bed but simply rocked me back to sleep by pulling the string  with her foot.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTante Betty was married to “Uncle Avril,” who had a huge dark-red nose  that had been frozen during World War I. I don’t know why he was only  called by his last name, the French word for “April.” For me, the name  has an interesting historical resonance: I assume that one of his  French ancestors stayed behind in Bavaria after the Napoleonic Wars at  the beginning of the nineteenth century. They lived in a large  apartment on the second floor of one of those houses with dark and  enormous ground floors constructed of huge stone slabs. Tante Betty had  a net shopping bag suspended on a rope from the second-floor banister  so that when she brought home groceries she did not have to carry them  upstairs but pulled them up on the rope. Tante Betty and her husband  rented out rooms to young boys from the country who went to the Passau  Gymnasium. She would cook for them and make their beds, and during the  war, when the Gymnasium students came back from their weekends in the  country they would always bring food. I remember Tante Betty’s big  dining-living room. (Was it really that big, or did it just seem so to  the little girl I was?) Over the table hung a lamp made of dark-green  fringed silk, which could be raised and lowered on a cord. Even after I  was a little older and had been taken away from Tante Betty, I visited  her as often as I could. In those remembered scenes, the students sit  around the table, she supervises their homework, and she sews; she must  have taken sewing in. I am just old enough to crouch on a chair and  bend over the table to paint or draw. I am busy, like the big boys  around the table, and Uncle Avril sits on the sofa and reads a paper in  semi-obscurity, because the light of the lamp over the table does not  reach into the corners of the room. These scenes around the table—I see  them as if they were a painting, the green lamp shade, the bright light  on the table with the people congregated around it, and the uncle in  the shaded background. Does his newspaper catch a glimmer of the light  and reflect it on his face? Is this how it was? Is this how it could  have been? Is this how I wish it had been? This scene is the only  memory I have of an intimate, tranquil domesticity during my early  childhood.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMy mother took me away from Tante Betty when I was about a year and a  half, old enough to be entrusted to a young woman from the  Arbeitsdienst (“Workers’ Service”), or, more precisely, the  Reichsarbeitsdienst, a Nazi-invented organization requiring young  people to do what we might today call community service, such as  draining swamps, working on farms, or, for girls especially, working in  households. My mother’s pride would never have allowed her to admit it,  but I know she was jealous of Tante Betty. She often told me that, when  she ran over to Tante Betty’s apartment during a break in her work  routine, Tante Betty would invariably say that I was asleep and could  not be disturbed. My mother at that time was nineteen years old and no  match for Tante Betty. But she could and did take me away from her.   From that time on, a succession of girls from the Arbeitsdienst would,  every afternoon, put me in a stroller and take me to my mother at the  hair salon. When my mother was free, she took me to a café around the  corner for ice cream and a Torte. These scenes I know from photographs.  But I also remember, unaided by photographs, that I waited for the  times when my mother was too busy to attend to me, because then I could  insist on being taken to see Tante Betty. I had little fits, yelling in  the stroller or stomping my feet on the sidewalk, and there was no girl  in the Arbeitsdienst who did not want to get rid of such a difficult  child and leave me with the adult whose name I so demandingly screamed.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOnce the war started, the girls from the Arbeitsdienst petered out. I  started going to nursery school, which was close to where Opapa and  Omama Baumeister lived. Here Lina, their longtime housekeeper and cook,  took me under her wing, and I felt empowered enough to be not very nice  to my mother. The earliest sign of rebellion I remember dates back to  my high chair days in the Baumeister apartment. Lunch in Germany is a  much heavier affair than in this country, and so it was in the  Baumeister family. On this particular occasion Lina had fixed me  Griesbrei, a soft and sweet kind of porridge made of matzoh meal and  served with raspberry syrup. It’s a favorite of children, and I assume  Lina thought I didn’t have enough teeth yet to chew on something  harder. I decided I didn’t want the Griesbrei, so Lina fixed me  scrambled eggs. I didn’t want those, either. (My mother, years later,  as we reminisced about Passau, would insist that I looked at her as I  asserted myself with another “No!” This I don’t remember, but it makes  sense.) Lina then heated and cut up some soft little sausages  (Weisswurst) for me, with kind words of encouragement, since she did  not want me to go hungry, but she did not understand that there was a  major power struggle going on. I rejected the sausages, too. At that  point, my mother tried to pull me out of the high chair to spank me,  but Opapa intervened: under no circumstances should she touch that  sweet, lovely child! Was I in triumph? I must have been, for the scene  is still so vivid in my mind that I see the kitchen in full color with  all its furniture, a glass door into the dark hallway, and on the other  side of the hallway the door to the living room, where I sat a few  years later on the windowsill to watch the beginning of the campaign  against Poland.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOpapa spoiled me in accordance with his tastes. He was a great lover of  horses—the Rottal, not far from Passau, was great horse country—and  when I was four years old, he bought me a pony. There are photographs  of me sitting on the pony, and I remember the stable where Opapa would  take me to feed it. It must have been a good pony, because it never  frightened me when I combed it with a rough brush, but I don’t remember  its name. I had the pony into the early months of the war; when all the  horses were confiscated, my pony replaced a horse in a circus.","brand":"Anchor","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46304966639845,"sku":"NP9781400076062","price":14.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781400076062.jpg?v=1767742148","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/the-way-home-isbn-9781400076062","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}