Full Circle: A Memoir

This is a personal history of the twentieth century as seen through the eyes of Edith Kurzweil, author, teacher, recipient of the National Medal of Humanities, and editor of Partisan Review--a journal whose founders "resolv[ed] to stay independent of all factional politics, while holding on to Marxism and publishing the best of modernism"--during its final period. The reader follows Kurzweil on her brave and perilous journey, at the age of fourteen, to Belgium, through France, Spain, and Portugal, alone with her younger brother. Instead of entering college life, she eventually became a conventional American housewife. After personal tragedy, she pursued her early intellectual ambitions and eventually became a professor of sociology, studying Italian entrepreneurs, European history and French thought, psychoanalysis and anti-Semitism. Kurzweil's journey has been one of courage, and of emotional and intellectual growth.

About the Author :
Walter Laqueur is distinguished scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC. He was a long-time director of the Wiener Library in London, and editor of the Journal of Contemporary History, Washington Papers, and Washington Quarterly. He was professor for many decades at the universities of Brandeis, Harvard, Tel Aviv, and Georgetown.

Review :
"Edith Kurzweil has lived many lives and prevailed against tremendous odds. As an Austrian Jew, she was not meant to live at all; as a first-generation immigrant in America, she wasn't expected to succeed; as a woman, who was also a 1950s-style wife and mother, she was not supposed to become a scholar in her own right. But Kurzweil refused to identify herself as a victim, choosing instead to view adversity as a useful challenge......The real jewel is this book, and the memories and insights it contains." --Phyllis Chesler, "Midwest Book Review" "[A]n engaging personal memoir.....We have the political history, she supplies a personal history. Kurzweil experiences the Second World War, the Cold War, and the Culture Wars, but what counts here is their effect on an individual existence. She writes skillfully enough to keep the personal story intriguing. However interesting the political moments, the most powerful images in "Full Circle" emerge from her own life. --Mark Bauerlein, "The New Criterion" "This displaced child of Europe lost neither her European savoir faire nor her admiration for those elements of the continent's intellectual tradition that in her academic career she sought to interpret to her adopted countrymen. But in coming to grasp just how alien to American soil were the twin terrors of fascism and Communism, Kurzweil also learned to cling to that soil and to feel it as her own. That course of discovery, or self-discovery, holds a profound lesson for anyone who by accident of birth has been blessed to remain distant from the awful human realities she narrowly escaped. --Benjamin Balint, "Commentary"