Reading Claudius | News & Events

An early photo of the Heller family.

Praise

“Heller plunges us lovingly and convincingly into that lost world, conjuring the youthful longings of her mother and her father, as well as her uncle’s magnetism.”
— Julia M. Klein, The Boston Globe

“In Reading Claudius, Caroline Heller does what Rilke called the “heart-work,” exploring moral accountability and the toll exacted by the fact of survival. Her family story begins in pre-war Czechoslovakia, passes through the Nazi holocaust, and continues on in postwar America, affirming that events may end but repercussions never do. A searching and humane memoir.”
— Sven Birkerts, author of The Art of Time in Memoir: Then, Again

“The book recalls Erich Maria Remarque’s Flotsam, in its ability to evoke the tremendous emotion of a disintegrating community. […] this fine book contains moments of emotion so pure that in the end, we too fall in love with the writer’s past.”
— Sarah Wildman, The New York Times

“{A} compelling memoir […] One of the time-honored ways for the Holocaust’s heirs to come to grips with its legacy is to write about it—to shine light on what had been hidden, to reconstruct the vanished world. […] This is what Caroline Heller has done.”
— Adam Kirsch, Tablet Magazine

“Caroline Heller writes with both honesty and delicacy. I was particularly enthralled by her finely drawn portrait of prewar Central Europe: a lost world whose memories are inestimably valuable and fiercely beautiful but which, without accounts like this, would fade forever.”
—Anne Fadiman, author of The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down

“Reading Claudius is much more than a work of riveting personal history. It is a feat of passionate, radical integrity. Caroline Heller has wedded the greatest level of care in her scholarship to an even deeper form of search: that in which imagination becomes not only an act of love but an instrument of truth.”
—Leah Hager Cohen, author of No Book but the World and The Grief of Others

“Reading Claudius is an inspiration; the reader is taken from Central Europe’s pre-war cultural atmosphere to the darkening days of the Second World War. The narrative is heartbreakingly honest as the memories of two generations become intertwined. The prose is clear and powerful, a testament to the book’s literary excellence.”

— Anna Ornstein, esteemed educator, psychoanalyst, author of My Mother’s Eyes

“The strength the characters found to reconstruct their lives—as well as to simply survive—is remarkable. Reading Claudius is a must for all readers. It sheds light on the times before Hitler destroyed a world, and it demonstrates how some of his victims rebuilt their lives on the ashes he left behind.”
—Suri Boiangiu, Jewish Book Council

“A deeply felt and deeply thought memoir, it manages to unearth a whole lost world with aching tenderness and regret.”
—Phillip Lopate, author of Portrait Inside My Head

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