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13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Funny and moving, August 27, 2007
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.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Dische dishes on family, May 14, 2009
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.
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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
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.
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