Title: A Thousand Kisses: A Family’s Escape From the Nazis to a New Life
Author: John W. Weiser
Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 1978318073
Pages: 244
Genre: Memoir / Biographical / History
Reviewer: David Allen
Pacific Book Review
Author John Weiser has gifted us not only with a stirring story of his family’s escape from tyranny, but with a historical chronicle that informs, enlightens and saddens as it unfolds. This memoir is a must-read which further illuminates the growing body of Holocaust and Diaspora literature.
Weiser handles his family’s story with meticulous detective-quality inquiry, carefully exposing each layer of accumulated grief and struggle with loving clarity and tenderness.
The Weisers’ experience was not unique. Far from it. Weiser’s parents, ‘Mummi’ and ‘Papa’, enjoyed all the perks of a dignified perhaps even gloriously ample life as Dr. and Mrs. Arthur Gaza Weiser, a successful urologist and wife in 1930s Vienna.
Or, considering the flood of historical events, maybe not so successful! Because 1930s Vienna witnessed the Anschluss, the annexation of Austria by Hitler’s burgeoning Reich. And with that came the serial and rabid persecution of that country’s Jews, including the Weisers. John (Johann, named after Goethe) with his sister Lisl and their mother, escaped to the relative safety of relations in Hungary, beginning a sequence of heart-rending correspondence between head of the family and now displaced wife and children.
When it rains it pours. Much of the book, and of the family’s ensuing struggle, concerns the difficult and at times impossible-seeming task of migration, relocation, settling down. By dint of sheer persistence, exercised over many months of aggravating waiting time, the family make it to Rio de Janeiro, then to Ipanema, Brazil, and finally, at long last, to America.
Their story is the story of an entire displaced generation. Their story will make you weep with pride, recognition and intense familiarity. Hansi (Johann, John) Weiser, the author, relates his first sighting of Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty with masterful narrative aplomb. He also soberly recalls his first sighting of Hitler in Vienna, ranting to adoring crowds.
The Weiser’s story is incredibly gripping because theirs is the story of our time: they are uprooted, fleeing from oppression, making it to America’s shores. What makes the book especially valuable is its view on politics, society and culture of the era. Weiser, with masterful strokes, gives a real feel for what it was like in South America in the early 1940s, rubbing elbows with transplanted European nobility and strident wannabe colonials, some with frank Nazi ties, in the New World of Brazil. Weiser’s handling of his father’s desperate search for work, of the family’s eventual affiliation with Baron Kummer, who cleared jungle and established a booming tapioca factory and trade, makes for absolutely fascinating reading. ‘A Thousand Kisses’, a phrase from a letter from Dr. Weiser to his wife, is that rare combination of memoir, world history and family folklore that draws you into its charming but terrifying world and leaves you breathless, edified, teary-eyed. Because the journey, trials and tribulations of the Weisers were essentially the same as all settlers in a new land, the same as many if not all Americans. The book is precious because John Weiser is not merely a chronicler, not merely a family historian: he is an expert storyteller who out of love for his family and country makes that story twinkle and shine.
A Thousand Kisses: A Family’s Escape From the Nazis to a New Life is a haunting, firsthand chronicle of courage, perseverance, and love in the face of unimaginable evil. John W. Weiser honors his family’s legacy by shedding light on the cost of survival, and the power of hope across generations. For readers of historical memoirs, Holocaust literature, and human triumph stories, this book is a must-read.
