"A compelling story ... examining what happens in our minds when we undergo unexpected encounters that are both awkward and personal. Memory, pain, love, and privacy all permeate the clear, clever prose."
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World Literature Today
“An elegantly crafted study of the Berlin-born, Viennese Jewish Fanny von Arnstein … What makes this book so successful in illuminating Fanny’s life is that Spiel situates her in the precarious, often-times absurd, and almost exclusively anti-Semitic history of early modern and modern European Jewry, drawing on quotations from a wide range of documents. Spiel’s daughter, Christine Shuttleworth, is a masterful translator of her mother’s masterpiece.”
Shulamit Reinharz, director of the Brandeis University Women’s Studies Research Center