Hester Among the Ruins

by Kirshenbaum, Binnie

• ISBN13: 9780156027502
• ISBN10: 015602750X
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2003-05-01
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Summary

History meets reality when biographer Hester Rosenfeld--very American and marginally Jewish--goes to Munich to research the life of Heinrich Falk and becomes his mistress. Born in Berlin in 1943, raised in the ruins of defeat by a generation of "murderers and cowards," Professor Falk is neither infamous nor famous--he is simply the German Everyman. Hester believes his life story could make for an important contemporary historical document--kitchen-table history. But as she uncovers more of his family history and its possible connection to Nazism, she finds herself reexamining her own feelings about her German immigrant parents and her complicated attraction to Heinrich. As the lovers' intimacy grows, each suspects the other of hiding something about the past. With the moral power of Bernhard Schlink's "The Reader, Kirshenbaum's searing novel bears powerful witness to history's unforgettable legacy and its continuing impact.

Author Biography

Binnie Kirshenbaum is the author of three novels, On Mermaid Avenue, A Disturbance in One Place, and Pure Poetry, and a story collection, History on a Personal Note. She teaches at Columbia University's Graduate School of the Arts and lives in New York City.

Excerpts

Chapter OneThey don't wear hats like that here His hair grows like grass in a cross breeze. This way and that. Blond and soft and no more than an inch long. I like his hair. A lot."Kindchenschema," he tells me. Kindchenschema is the word for it, but instead of translating he draws me a picture. On a blank page of my open notebook, he draws the head of an animal I don't recognize. A cross between a dog and a cat. A tuft of hair on its head stands up straight, with some hair leaning to the left and some leaning to the right. It looks like a hieroglyphic or a cave painting, a rendering of an animal extinct or of the imagination. "Young animals," he explains, "have short snouts and soft round heads which make other animals like and protect them."Smitten with that idea, that his hair might have such an effect, he smiles, and his smile is a good one. Capable of charming the pants off, well, me, to name one.When he is not smiling, he is still very handsome, but it's a different look altogether.With one hand, he lifts his beer stein and polishes off the remains of his Helles. Then he asks me, "Do you want another?"I've barely made a dent in mine, a Radler, which is a concoction of half beer and half lime juice in a stein as tall as my arm. To lift it, I hold it the way a small child holds a cup, with two hands to keep it steady. It's the same sort of stein with which Thomas Wolfe got whomped on the head, eventually, rumor had it, dying of complications from the injury sustained. "How about something to eat?" I say. "A snack."He goes off to one of the four or five concession stands, and alone, without him to gaze upon, I look around at where I am.I am in Munich. Munich, Germany. When I told people-friends, colleagues, my landlord-that I was going to Munich, I was asked, "Why?" as if I'd said I was going to someplace like Cleveland, Ohio, or Scranton, Pennsylvania. Moreover, Jews, even entirely irreligious ones like me, rarely put Munich on their holiday wish lists. And so I was asked, "Why Munich, of all places?""Professional reasons," I explained. "A new book." Which is the truth. Just not all of the truth. It's a talent of mine to tell truth in part and to omit the rest. And indeed part of the truth is that I am writing a history which demands I be here to study documents, to look at photographs, to conduct interviews, to understand the landscape, to ferret out secrets.Munich is his city.For the past twenty-two years now, Munich has been his home. Although he was raised largely in Frankfurt, he was born in Berlin in 1943 in an air-raid shelter during a blackout.I am in Munich, smack in the middle of the Englischer Garten, a grand park designed in the tradition, untamed, of the Romantic English gardens. Hence the name. The hub of this beer garden is a Chinese Tower. It's a copy of the original copy, which was burned to the ground in 1944. The original copy, erected in 1789, was modeled on the pagoda in London's Kew Gardens, whi

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Excerpted from Hester among the Ruins by Binnie Kirshenbaum
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