{"product_id":"a-life-in-the-making-isbn-9781782276852","title":"A Life in the Making","description":"\u003cb\u003eThe inspiring, meditative classic autobiography of a pioneering nineteenth-century autodidact and writer, in English for the first time\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOver the 29 years of his short life, Franz Michael Felder worked with furious productivity to better himself and the lives of those around him. From his humble origins in the Austrian village of Schoppernau, he went on to found workers' cooperatives, a political party and even a public library in his own home, as well as writing many literary works. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eA Life in the Making\u003c\/i\u003e is both the culmination of this extraordinary career and a chronicle of its development. It is a story of early hardship and fortitude, of Felder's relentless zeal for learning and his lifelong effort to reconcile his own expanding horizons with the enforced confines of the community he was born to. Unfolding in prose of limpid beauty, \u003ci\u003eA Life in the Making\u003c\/i\u003e becomes a deeply moving tribute to Felder's wife Nanni, and to his enduring belief in the possibility of a better world.\"One of the masterpieces of 19th-century German literature.\"\u003cb\u003e -- \u003ci\u003ePolis \u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Exhumed from oblivion… blessed with a strange power… The 21st-century reader will never forget this friend from Schoppernau.\" \u003cb\u003e-- \u003ci\u003eLe Matricule de Anges \u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003eFranz   Michael Felder has left us something which will always remain both as a   record and as a work of art. --Arno Geiger\u003cb\u003eFranz Michael Felder \u003c\/b\u003e(1839-1869)  was born to a farming family in Schoppernau, Austria. Over the course  of his short life, he created a towering legacy as a writer and social  reformer. Felder was one of the first Austrian writers to document the  farming life he was born to, and he earned a reputation as a rebel  through his socially critical writing and work in politics and  agricultural reform. He began to write his masterpiece, \u003ci\u003eA Life in the Making\u003c\/i\u003e, shortly after the death of his beloved wife Nanni, and Felder himself died only months after finishing it.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eDavid Henry Wilson\u003c\/b\u003e is a playwright, novelist  and children’s author. He lectured for many  years at the universities  of Bristol and Constance, where he founded the  university theatre.I\u003cbr\u003e Between six and seven o’ clock in the morning, on 13th May\u003cbr\u003e 1839, I arrived in the world at Schoppernau, the last village\u003cbr\u003e in the Bregenzerwald. What heavenly sights were to be seen,\u003cbr\u003e and during what phase of the moon I arrived, my father did not\u003cbr\u003e record. The day must have been a fine one, though, because\u003cbr\u003e our labourers had been sent out to perform their first task in\u003cbr\u003e the fields, which was muck-spreading.\u003cbr\u003e My cries, however, were so pitiful, and I was obviously so\u003cbr\u003e unhappy to have entered the world, that everyone was seriously\u003cbr\u003e concerned that I wanted nothing more than to follow my brother\u003cbr\u003e Josef—who had been born two years earlier—up into heaven,\u003cbr\u003e where I too would turn into a little angel.\u003cbr\u003e Even my godmother would not have liked that because, thanks\u003cbr\u003e to my little brother, she already had what every godmother\u003cbr\u003e longs for—an innocent advocate to plead her case before God.\u003cbr\u003e My father, however, was even more concerned about the\u003cbr\u003e sickly child. He felt no desire at all to go muck-spreading. After\u003cbr\u003e breakfast he actually sent the labourers home with a full day’s\u003cbr\u003e pay, and the hard-working, stingy neighbours could say what\u003cbr\u003e they liked.\u003cbr\u003e Later, when I grew and thrived and behaved like any normal\u003cbr\u003e child, apparently he often used to say he thought it was a bad\u003cbr\u003e omen that the moment I arrived, I caused so much trouble that\u003cbr\u003e I’d kept him away from his work and shattered his daily routine.\u003cbr\u003e He was afraid that I would never become a proper farmer. This\u003cbr\u003e would make him very unhappy. If not by farming, how else\u003cbr\u003e could any poor person earn a living amid these mountains in\u003cbr\u003e the gloomy confines of the Ach Valley?\u003cbr\u003e Oral tradition has it that the Felder family is descended from\u003cbr\u003e a Magyar prisoner who swiftly became extremely popular during\u003cbr\u003e his captivity. It appears that he moved from the Swabian side\u003cbr\u003e of Lake Constance to the mountains, where he lived from 924\u003cbr\u003e until 954, because he had fallen so deeply in love with a girl from\u003cbr\u003e the Black Forest that he preferred to run away with her and live\u003cbr\u003e under a German name, in what was then the still-uninhabited\u003cbr\u003e Bregenzerwald, rather than share the fine fruits of hard German\u003cbr\u003e labour with his uncivilized fellow countrymen. Of course, evidence\u003cbr\u003e of all this would be difficult, if not impossible, to find.\u003cbr\u003e Nevertheless, it is a strange fact that this tale alone has rooted\u003cbr\u003e in people’s minds the firm belief that we came originally from\u003cbr\u003e the Black Forest. And so even today, anyone whose shirt bears\u003cbr\u003e a name beginning with F—that is to say, Felder—is regarded as\u003cbr\u003e a peculiar outsider, a maverick from birth.\u003cbr\u003e It may well be that this actually caused some Felders to\u003cbr\u003e become peculiar mavericks, because anyone who has been\u003cbr\u003e condemned or marginalized by public opinion, and who is not\u003cbr\u003e totally lacking in self-esteem, may all too easily try to oppose\u003cbr\u003e this almighty force which for so many constitutes the one and\u003cbr\u003e only guide for life.\u003cbr\u003e Of the many children whose birthdays my grandfather\u003cbr\u003e had recorded on the last page of our 300-year-old \u003ci\u003eLives of the\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003eSaints\u003c\/i\u003e, my father was the oldest survivor. At a very early age,\u003cbr\u003e he had to take over from his ailing father the difficult and\u003cbr\u003e physically demanding task not only of managing the large,\u003cbr\u003e unwieldy farm, but also of running the household. This was\u003cbr\u003e made all the more arduous by the fact that my grandfather\u003cbr\u003e was generally believed to have pawned every object he could\u003cbr\u003e lay his hands on. The old records appear to offer very little\u003cbr\u003e evidence to the contrary. The thickness of the line that my\u003cbr\u003e father drew through each paid-off debt suggests just how much\u003cbr\u003e blood, sweat and tears it cost him. On the other hand, his hard\u003cbr\u003e work increasingly earned him the trust of the villagers and\u003cbr\u003e the respect even of those who because of their financial and\u003cbr\u003e family status were, not unjustly, known as the “aristocracy”.\u003cbr\u003e And so the man who initially had been looked down on by\u003cbr\u003e everyone must have felt a good deal better about himself. All\u003cbr\u003e the same, he remained faithful to the poor, hard-working girl\u003cbr\u003e who had for so long remained faithful to him, and therefore it\u003cbr\u003e was in vain that those born with silver spoons in their mouths\u003cbr\u003e now smilingly invited him to enter their fine houses. He was\u003cbr\u003e fiercely independent, and for ten years he worked tirelessly, so\u003cbr\u003e that he would be able to bring his bride into a household that\u003cbr\u003e was fit for purpose.\u003cbr\u003e This finally happened in 1836, just after Easter, when Jakob\u003cbr\u003e was thirty-one and my mother five years older. On the back\u003cbr\u003e of an old expired bond, in my father’s handwriting, is a list of\u003cbr\u003e all those who attended the wedding feast. There is also a note\u003cbr\u003e that his first child was born in 1837, but the Heavenly Father\u003cbr\u003e had quickly taken him to be one of His angels. This was all the\u003cbr\u003e more reason for the fearfulness with which they nursed me,\u003cbr\u003e and Aunt Dorothe, my godmother, has often told me how after\u003cbr\u003e practically every meal they would add to their prayer a special\u003cbr\u003e Paternoster for me.\u003cbr\u003e It is from this aunt—my father’s youngest sister—that I have\u003cbr\u003e learnt most of what I know about the first years of my life. She\u003cbr\u003e lived with us and was my nursemaid when my mother was\u003cbr\u003e helping my father out in the fields. She herself suffered from a\u003cbr\u003e disease that affected her limbs, and so she could only do things\u003cbr\u003e like embroidery or very light farm work. Looking after me\u003cbr\u003e might well have been too much of a strain on her at times, but\u003cbr\u003e she always took great pleasure in whatever she was able to do.\u003cbr\u003e For someone who had been used to living and working in the\u003cbr\u003e open air, it was a real comfort to spend the seemingly endless\u003cbr\u003e summer days with me.\u003cbr\u003e Once I had learnt to walk, she would watch each step with\u003cbr\u003e the anxiety of the sick person who, in the light of her own\u003cbr\u003e weakness, sees stress and danger in someone else’s every movement.\u003cbr\u003e This anxiety increased still further when my ever-watchful\u003cbr\u003e observer discovered that I was short-sighted. What was initially\u003cbr\u003e just a small white spot in my right eye began to get bigger. At\u003cbr\u003e first it remained a family secret. My pious mother said that only\u003cbr\u003e God could help, and during the sleepless nights before my birth\u003cbr\u003e she had offered up many a Paternoster and even whole rosaries\u003cbr\u003e for me. Because she had long since known that her child would\u003cbr\u003e become like the man from Tannberg who had been blinded by\u003cbr\u003e the snow. The sight of him had so terrified her that she could\u003cbr\u003e never forget him.","brand":"Pushkin Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46301054304485,"sku":"NP9781782276852","price":18.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781782276852_81dc4b0e-8207-4d02-a7ca-98fcb86c6f15.jpg?v=1742922707","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/a-life-in-the-making-isbn-9781782276852","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}