Runaway Waltz
A Memoir from Vienna to New York
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
One of the most revered essayists and novelists of his generation, Frederic Morton has captured with matchless immediacy the glamour of Vienna before World War I and the storied opulence of the Rothschild family in his bestselling and award-winning works. Now, in his first book in more than fifteen years, he delivers a luminous look at his own unique pursuit of the American dream.
Like many Austrian boys in 1936, the author idolizes Fritz Austerlitz, the Austrian American who went to Hollywood and emerged as Fred Astaire. When his family is forced to flee Vienna, Fritz Mandelbaum becomes Fred Morton and immigrates to New York City. Though he does not learn English until he is sixteen years old, Morton nonetheless goes on to succeed as a writer. The author sets out ten scenes from his pilgrim life and his remarkable road to success: from watching a poorly dubbed Astaire in Vienna to delivering apricot tarts as a baker's assistant in New York; from Salt Lake City where as a young English instructor he met Vladimir Nabokov to a Christmas spent with the Rothschilds at Château Mouton.
Runaway Waltz is a soulful, beautifully written portrait of one man's extraordinary quest for fulfillment and enduring transformation.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The author of two National Book Award winners (The Rothschilds and A Nervous Splendor), Viennese-born Fred Morton started life as Fritz Mandelbaum, his name Americanized once his family, fleeing the Nazis, began a tentative new life in New York City. In this deeply sentimental and slightly smug memoir, Morton charts his rise from obscurity to fame: from his teenage idolization of fellow Austrian-American immigrant Fred Astaire, to the tedium of a summer job as a Manhattan baker's assistant; his youthful encounter with the sneeringly patronizing Vladimir Nabokov; his emergence as a successful journalist and writer, interviewing Thomas Mann and spending Christmas with the Rothschilds; to his feelings of alienation and emotional vulnerability among high society at an elite skiing lodge. Throughout Morton evokes his loving, dignified family as his emotional touchstone, a family that remained distinctly Viennese despite their best efforts to Americanize. The other touchstone is his wife, Marcia, although Morton's writing about her can be cloying and idealized. While Morton's professional remembrances are full of anecdotal and incidental detail, his limpid, stoic voice is overly formal and distant. His memoir suffers from an overall flatness, neither successfully representing the people around him nor compellingly evoking the layered consciousness of past selves.
