The Empress of Weehawken: A Novel [Hardcover]

Irene Dische (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 7, 2007

At the end of what is (she cannot help observing) an extraordinary life, Elisabeth Rother has decided to write her memoirs. She brushes aside her narrow escape with her Jewish husband from the Nazis, and the perilous voyage to the New World of New Jersey. The subject that really consumes her is the waywardness of her impossible daughter, Renate, and her granddaughter, Irene.

 

Renate performs autopsies on the bodies of politicians whom death has harvested in the nighttime arms of their mistresses. Worse, she sleeps on unironed sheets. Irene drops out of school to roam the world, refuses to correct her nose with plastic surgery, and shows alarming signs of enjoying sex. What is to be done with such women?

A curiously touching love letter to the difficult but sustaining love of mothers and daughters, The Empress of Weehawken is a masterpiece of comedy with an unexpected lilt of redemption at its close.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Frau Professor Doktor Rother, the narrator of this brutally funny debut, is self-centered, cynical, sarcastic, fiercely proud of her Aryan heritage and incorrigibly anti-Semitic. As a German army nurse in WWI, Elizabeth Gierlich meets wealthy Jewish surgeon Carl Rother and marries him once he converts to Catholicism. They have a racially impure daughter, Renate, whom Elizabeth mocks and chastises relentlessly, even as she dotes on her. After the Nazis rise to power in Germany, life for Elizabeth's in-laws becomes precarious (forced labor was not a high-earning profession), and Carl's honorary Aryan status can't protect him from the SS once he irks them by protesting the forced sterilization of Jews. The Rothers flee to the less-civilized world of Weehawken, N.J., where Renate grows up, marries Jewish professor Dische, becomes a successful pathologist and has two children, a boy too intelligent for his own good and a rebellious daughter, Irene, whose adventures, tracked via letters and collect calls home, take her across the Middle East and Africa. Elizabeth dies in 1989, still outspoken and bigoted, and continues to meddle in her beloved daughter's life from Heaven. Dische evokes human failings so skillfully that readers will catch themselves laughing at mankind at its cruelest and darkest. (Aug.)
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Review

“Incredibly witty, beautifully written… ‘The Empress of Weehawken’ is a potent stew of class, sex and religion, as well as cultural and generational clashes, and Dische crafts a glorious misanthrope in her fictionalized version of her grandmother.” – The Star-Ledger

“Brilliant… discomfitingly funny… [Dische’s] narrator is as winning and willful as any reader could wish for… [A] marvelous exploration of honor and identity, greed, sacrifice and just deserts… Just as Dische’s staccato rhythms and deadpan sentences stretch into lyricism, so too what seems stark, even cynical, moves into an entirely unsentimental, deeply satisfying (and sometimes scary) love.” -- Newsday

“Self-centered, insufferable narrators are hardly strangers to contemporary fiction, but it helps if they’re as funny as they are grandiloquent. …The voice of the reprobate-empress here is pitch-perfect…Dische has captured this fictionalized grandmother…with pepper and grace.” —Gail Caldwell, Boston Globe

“A vivid, rollicking tour…The real grandeur of The Empress of Weehawken…lies in the narrator’s voice. Pure as a bell, always unerringly true to character, Frau Rother is drawn as accurately as the slice of a surgeon’s scalpel. And that’s what the author is doing here, performing autopsies on the characters of her family.” —Los Angeles Times

“Superb…Razor-sharp, desert-dry and luxuriantly ironic…The story covers three generations, yet no individual is given short shrift, and even minor players are multidimensional. Frau Rother herself is an absolute triumph...While completely satisfying, the last page feels turned too soon. That bittersweet sense of having enjoyed the ride but being sad that it’s over is as much as any reader can ask for.” —San Diego Union-Tribune

“Dense, dark family history loosely based on the author's own becomes relatable and funny through the no-nonsense narration of Elisabeth Rother, an upstanding Catholic German who marries a Jewish doctor before WWII.” —Entertainment Weekly

“Every page is a delight…[in] this brutally funny debut…Dische evokes human failings so skillfully that readers will catch themselves laughing at mankind at its cruelest and darkest.” —Publishers Weekly                                                                                                                                       

“Dische manages to blend the comic and the poignant in a style that captivates and delights . . . Highly recommended.” —Library Journal (starred review)                                                                                

“Enthralling.” —Kirkus Reviews

"I would tell you The Empress of Weekhawken is my favorite book, but you’d think I was exaggerating. So let’s just leave it at: it’s perfect."   —Patricia Marx, author of Him Her Him Again The End of Him

 

“Frau Professor Doktor Rother is stubborn, hypochondriacal, selfish, devoid of the slightest sentimentality, judgmental, a creature of infinite blame and contempt. She is also, by the way, brutally, brutally funny. Two parts honesty, one part arsenic. I couldn’t get enough of her life story—Irene Dische made me laugh at the shock of it all.” —Glen David Gold, author of Carter Beats the Devil

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; First Edition edition (August 7, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374299129
• ISBN-13: 978-0374299125
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.4 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,600,767 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Funny and moving, August 27, 2007

By 

A. Smith "RebaMcIntire" (Ames, Iowa United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Empress of Weehawken: A Novel (Hardcover)

A rare contemporary novel that survives and even surpasses its accompanying hype. I LOVED this book! The narrator, Frau Doktor Rother, is fat but beautiful, smart but under-achieving, anti-Semitic but married to a Jew, and aristocratic though brought low during the war. She's lucky--and she knows it--to land in Weehawken New Jersey and reunite with her surgeon husband, whose family is being eradicated by the Nazis. She is sui generis--larger than life with an utterly compelling voice. Full of judgments, full of juice, but unwaveringly religious. The plot is almost beside the point, it's all about these smart, prickly, disappointed European German and Jewish immigrants who, with all their talents and sophistication, are often clueless in their American incarnations. The Empress of Weehawken is a comedy of manners conducted from a wing seat in Heaven. Though full of romantic entanglements, the relationships in it that truly matter are those between mothers and daughters. Very moving, suggestive of important truths (though never explicitly), and a wonderful delicious read.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Dische dishes on family, May 14, 2009

By 

Patti "PattisPages" (Atlanta, GA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Empress of Weehawken: A Novel (Paperback)

Irene Dische gets extra credit for her staccato writing style. The brisk--almost breathless--sentences add to the inherent humor. The book is fiction, but it's narrated by the author's Catholic grandmother, affectionately known as Mops, a nurse who marries a Jewish doctor, Carl Rother, in 1930's Germany. Carl converts to Catholicism, but it doesn't stop the SS from barring Aryan citizens from seeking Carl's medical attention. His wife's relatives help Carl emigrate to the U.S., where his poor command of the English language stymies his attempts to pass the pathology board exam that will enable him to practice medicine. Also in danger is Carl's half-Jewish daughter Renate, a headstrong teenager who refuses to conceal her lineage in Nazi Germany. After Carl gets his M.D. but loses his job prospect, his wife and daughter join him in New York. There Renate marries Dische, known primarily by his last name and for "hogging the eccentricity limelight." I know this doesn't sound like it should be funny, but the narration makes it so. Oddly enough, the humor diminishes when Irene herself becomes a more central character.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars I wanted to love this book, but could not be convinced after all, December 17, 2008

By 

B.Friendly "Bee" - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Empress of Weehawken: A Novel (Paperback)

This is a hard book to review. Initially one gets overwhelmed by the tempo and humor of the "I" story teller in the book, lady Rother. And until page 100 I was still a happy reader, enthralled in the action, but soon thereafter I got more and more disenchanted and could not understand why. Then it hit me: none of the characters, and I mean NONE are actually likable. Not that they have to be, but all remain strangely flat. They are good and/or interesting, but more bad than good most of the time. The black pedagogy of the family's child rearing is sometimes unbearable, and ultimately, Dische does not really give the characters true depths. The Rother couple remain distant not only to eachother but to the reader, I think. The relationship to the daughter and grandchildren is more or less cool, or so it appears. The novel is more journalistic in style, telling one event after another, but there are no feelings anywhere, despite the severity of the historic events. We do get to know grandmother Rother as a young woman, new wife, mother and later grandmother, but I am not sure what the reader is to do with her. I could not devlop love or hate for her. Ambiguity has its limits. From what I read on the first 50 pages, I expected to become more fascinated with the characters, but as the events unfold, I become more and more bored and turned off. But this is most likely my fault, not the author's. See for yourselves.