Otto, The Boy At The Window

As sixty-eight year old Peter
Abeles confronts his ambivalence over his mothers recent death, he laces
together his childhood memories of the prewar Austrian aristocracy his Jewish
family belonged to, the rising tide of hate that engulfed them and their decision
to flee, and the story of his life in America.
In trying to come to terms with his personal history and family, Abeles looks
beyond the immediate horrors of the Holocaust and the Diaspora to some of the
more subtle effects on the reconstructed lives that followed. He gives a hard,
honest account of his upbringing by a cold, demanding father and an embittered,
materialistic mother...but he frames that account in forgiveness and redemption,
imagining his dead mother as she receives a treasure box of Sefirot, the ten
Hebrew words that allow an individual to know Kabbalah,
or wisdom.

Peter Abeles and Tom Hicks have
produced an intelligent and edifying memoir that has much to say about exile
and immigration, about class, money, love and forgiveness. In Otto, the Boy at
the Window, they offer readers some hard-earned shreds of Kabbalah.

Praise for Otto, the Boy at the
Window:

This unforgettable book opens
with the death of Abeles mother in Long Island when he
was 68, which prompts him to reflect on his Viennese childhood in the 1930s.
His mother was strict and possessive, and his father was unyielding. The father
owned a thriving wholesale shoe business, and the family had servants and
tutors. Abeles relives the Anschluss
of March 12, 1938, when the
Nazis took control of Austria,
and he remembers mobs of Nazi sympathizers destroying synagogues and
Jewish-owned properties during Kristallnacht in
November of that year. In November 1939, the family sailed from Rotterdam
to New York with only $10 left
from their fortune. They went to Chicago,
where two sponsoring families met them. Abeles recounts
his subsequent service in the U.S. Air Force, his success in the business
world, and his love of family life in this story of reconciliation and
forgiveness, which is told with grace and insight.