Edith Kurzweil
Full Circle: A Memoir.
Transaction, 287 pages, $49.95

On a gray Vienna afternoon in November 1938, thirteen-year-old
Edith Weisz heard a commotion in the street below the family
apartment. Eight months before, “miles and miles” of S.S.
troops and brownshirts had marched down the avenue tossing
brisk salutes as airplanes dropped pamphlets asking
Austrians to welcome Hitler as he decreed the annexation of
their nation. One day after Austria’s chancellor had
resigned, Edith’s mother learned that their brand-new Ford
had been requisitioned, and soon her father, a marble and
stone merchant, landed in jail when a rival swore out a
warrant against him for “unfair competition.” He won his
release by selling his business for a pittance and leaving
the country (the option was Dachau).

Earlier, when the troops first marched in, Edith “wished to
be one of the children hopping and singing alongside.” This
time, though, the invaders weren’t pacing in rank and asking
for welcome. Instead, “hordes of stomping, pink-cheeked
stormtroopers in brown and black-clad S.S. men—along with
ordinary Viennese—were throwing Torah scrolls, bibles, and
other holy articles into the street.” Kristallnacht had
begun.

The episode opens Full Circle, an engaging personal memoir
by Edith Kurzweil, a scholar of French thought and
psychoanalysis, professor of sociology, and the last editor
of Partisan Review. Eighty-five pages of flight follow as
Edith and her younger brother enter Belgium as child
refugees, cross into France when Belgium falls to Hitler,
then pass through