Rating: 
Summary: A gem of a book
Review: I am a voracious reader always on the lookout for a good new (to me) author. Margaret McMullan is that. This latest novel of hers is a haunting, evocative story of a mother and daughter (told from alternating viewpoints, a tactic that works very well here) seeking connectedness after a lifetime of polite estrangement. As the story unfolds, we see why Jenny has become who she is as a mother. Her story unfolds from 1930's Austria to current day America. Ms McMullan's descriptions of 1930's Austria as war encroaches on an unsuspecting people, are so vivid that you can smell the air and hear the music. And by the end of the book, you will come to care about Jenny and Elizabeth greatly and come to understand a lot about love, loss, and especially, hope.
Rating:
Summary: A gem of a book
Review: I am a voracious reader always on the lookout for a good new (to me) author. Margaret McMullan is that. This latest novel of hers is a haunting, evocative story of a mother and daughter (told from alternating viewpoints, a tactic that works very well here) seeking connectedness after a lifetime of polite estrangement. As the story unfolds, we see why Jenny has become who she is as a mother. Her story unfolds from 1930's Austria to current day America. Ms McMullan's descriptions of 1930's Austria as war encroaches on an unsuspecting people, are so vivid that you can smell the air and hear the music. And by the end of the book, you will come to care about Jenny and Elizabeth greatly and come to understand a lot about love, loss, and especially, hope.
Rating:
Summary: I've Already Been Attracted
Review: I know the author's first novel and that's why I started to read this - her second.
As I had expected, I've already been attracted by the story though I'm yet only half way. I especially like the description of a father and a very young daughter relationship at the beginning which easily reminds us of our own similar happy childhood with our father. Elegant, refined still very serious is my first impression of this novel. Besides, the English of this novel is not so hard for non-English speakers like me.
I can't wait to see what will be happening to this family. I'll go on reading as fast as I can. "I'll be back" here when I'm finished with it.A Japanese reader in Japan!!
Rating:
Summary: A Room with more than a view
Review: In My Mother's House by Margaret McMullan is a literary masterpiece of juxtapositions - in plot, pace, perspective and personal politics. McMullan, who is the Chair of the English department at the University of Evansville, has crafted a novel set amidst a backdrop of several generations of extraordinary women, seeking to find meaning despite the selfish, destructive, and ultimately cowardly actions of the family patriarch. Particularly, this is the story of a mother, Genevieve, and her daughter Elizabeth, who grapple to come to terms with each other and themselves in understanding Genevieve's father and Elizabeth's grandfather, an Austrian monarchist and intellectual who literally sold out to the Nazis.
This sell-out of family, religion, and home symbolically represents Austria's lack of any resistance in its "Anschluss" to Nazi Germany - a German term literally translated as "coupling on to the end." Indeed, the patriarch's conversion from Judaism to Catholicism, and his sale of the little Viennese palace "Hofzeile", the family's aristocratic home, to the nephew of top-ranking Nazi official Hermann Goering are the beginning of the end and eventually represent the complicated fiber in Elizabeth's and Genevieve's tormenting search for self-knowledge. Ultimately, it is the patriarch's selfish abandonment of mother, wife and daughter in the face of Nazi atrocities and persecution that not only makes a powerful statement for a family's power resting in its maternal roots, but also seals the fact that this family has reached its final destination. A further "Anschluss," a term used in present-day German to refer to connecting flights or trains, for this family seems unlikely.
Indeed, as the mother and daughter team eventually flee Europe for the United States, Genevieve proclaims that "we are going to a new country where we would be new people." Representative of the women's struggle is Genevieve's amendment that "we wouldn't be altogether new - that we would still remember and we always would be the sum total of what happens to us." It is the escape from Vienna that defines Genevieve's and Elizabeth's relationship; told from the perspective of the daughter Elizabeth, her mother Genevieve "changed that night and everything between us changed."
McMullan masterfully tells the story from two different perspectives - from both Genevieve's and Elizabeth's points of view. Not only has she created a chronological juxtaposition between the pre-war, World War II and the post-war generations, but she also is able to create fascinating insights into cultural nuances between the traditional world of the Austrian capital of Vienna and the modern-day world of the United States. It is the stuffy, traditional Vienna that despite its glorious wealth of artistry and history loses in this transcontinental showdown. This cultural contrast is a constant theme throughout McMullan's novel, skillfully portrayed by the classical music of Austrian composers Elizabeth had learned to play on the piano, while Genevieve pursues the guitar and the groundbreaking music of Arlo Guthrie and other American icons of folk and rock music. At its most basic clue for a struggle of identity is the transformation of the name Genevieve into a simple "Jenny."
It is the mother Genevieve, who holds on to Vienna's rich artistry or intellectual wealth and finer things such as real candles on a Christmas tree. But at the same time she despises all the history, particularly the moment in time when Austria was "angeschlossen," - connected on to the end of Germany. This hatred plays out in her relationship with her father, whose memoirs are as impersonal as it can get, mostly written in the passive voice without hardly any reference to family. It is fascinating to note that McMullan weaves into Genevieve's story that Sigmund Freud also never was able to re-connect with his native Vienna and Austria, referred to as the motherland in stark contrast to German's heritage deriving from the fatherland.
Just as Genevieve struggles to live in exile, it is difficult for her daughter to find her ways. She actively tries to re-connect to the family's past, most symbolically in her conversion to Judaism. In a personal pilgrimage to Vienna, Elizabeth visits her grandmother's grave in the city's Jewish cemetery, while her grandfather's recently-dug grave lies in one of the city's Christian cemeteries. She fully understands her grandfather's life at this point - a fraud so inglorious that her own mother had never come to internalize. Just as her grandmother's gravestone proclaims "Going Home," Elizabeth is now ready to return home. In some sense, the family's connection to the future is sealed, but only after both mother and daughter understand that the family patriarch's journey was one to nowhere.
Rating:
Summary: A Deeply Gratifying Read
Review: IN MY MOTHER'S HOUSE is a richly textured story that explores the intricate complications and emotional entanglements of a mother/daughter relationship. Coursing back and forth in time across the 20th Century -- from Vienna, to Mississippi, to Great Britain, to suburban Chicago, and the many geographical and spiritual points between -- author Margaret McMullan mines the depths of her characters' psyches with inspired precision. This is a deeply gratifying read for anyone who has longed to unlock the mysteries of their parents as children.
Rating:
Summary: A Deeply Gratifying Read
Review: IN MY MOTHER'S HOUSE is a richly textured story that explores the intricate complications and emotional entanglements of a mother/daughter relationship. Coursing back and forth in time across the 20th Century -- from Vienna, to Mississippi, to Great Britain, to suburban Chicago, and the many geographical and spiritual points between -- author Margaret McMullan mines the depths of her characters' psyches with inspired precision. This is a deeply gratifying read for anyone who has longed to unlock the mysteries of their parents as children.
Rating:
Summary: powerful examination of Holocaust legacy on mother, daughter
Review: In what unforeseen manners does a catastrophic event, now years past, continue to define a family's identity? Is it best for a parent to forget a troubled past and shield her child from anguish or to assist the child in confronting something that could upset, alter or even destroy a parent-child relationship? To what extent is the past never "the past," but a continuous, immediate presence in our daily lives? Margaret McMullan has attempted to answer these questions in her strong, sensitive and essential novel, "In My Mother's House," a profound examination of the Holocaust on the second and third generation of survivors. McMullan explores the Holocaust's resonant hurt and answers its unspoken questions through Elizabeth and her mother Jenny, the latter bent on denial and silence, the former wrestling with existential confusion, a tormented relationship with her mother and an unresolved identity.
"In My Mother's House" is permeated with what memoirist Fern Schumer Chapman, author of "Motherland," concisely labels "the half-life of the Holocaust:" its silent, subtle and surreptitious grip on the children of survivors. Jenny is a child escapee and daughter of an aloof, imperious Jewish father who converted to Catholicism as an adult and repudiated his ancestral heritage. Now an assimilated American, she has produced a sensitive, questioning daughter who feels incomplete and adrift because of her lack of knowledge of her mother's past. Elizabeth describes herself "immersed in death and memory," but her self-definition accurately depicts her mother.
Mother and daughter face the vexing issues survivors and their children necessarily confront if there is to be any hope of family coherence and personal mental health. Abandonment and denial. Self-eradication and the legacy of loss. Displacement and return. Memory and connection. As Elizabeth presses her mother for a full disclosure of the past and as Jenny steadfastly rebuffs her daughter's attempts to explore what the mother has walled off, both women risk having their hearts "tighten up" as though they were "hardened candy."
At the onset of the novel, Elizabeth is unaware of her mother's past, presumably content with her present status as an American Catholic, newly relocated from Mississippi to Chicago's North Shore. "My mother never spoke of the past." The child Elizabeth is aware that members of her family perished during World War II, but she "had to figure `the war' out on" her own. Not illogically, she concludes that the "death camps were for Catholics, not Jews."
While Jenny consciously obliterates any mention of the past, constructing an icy distance from her estranged father and, by inference, her family's past, Elizabeth unconsciously replicates her mother's pattern. When her great grandmother regularly sends her pieces of tarnished silverware, the child hides them under her bed in a box, next to her grandfather's discarded autobiography, "which lies facedown...an arm's reach away." The dulled family heirlooms come to symbolize an obscured, painful history, too ugly to use but too precious to discard.
During Elizabeth's adolescence, her mother's obdurate silence crystallizes into an emphatic declaration: "I swore no more questions about the past...about what was dead and gone." Already conscious about her family's differences from their affluent, assimilated Midwestern neighbors, Elizabeth determines "that I would never ask another question about what was dead and gone." Her fear is that her "mother's past would run our little family." Yet denied history does not disappear, and as Elizabeth matures into adulthood, her unresolved appetite for historical authenticity gnaws at her; her resultant anorexia causes her body to disappear but her hunger for truth to grow.
Margaret McMullen's compassionate portrayal of Elizabeth's quest for identity resolves the question of an unresolved past, one which has poisoned Jenny's relationship with her father, one which has fractured her deep but injurious love for Elizabeth and one which has made Elizabeth incapable of giving and receiving love. Elizabeth's decision to seek out her Jewish roots matches her mother's commitment to eradicate them. Both derive from ruined history, denial and the consequences of self-eradication.
Increasingly, as the living voices of survivors become fewer in number, we will come to depend on their children to assist us in understanding the implications of the Holocaust. "In My Mother's House" illuminates the pivotal issue of identity formation in the shadow of the Holocaust through a mother-daughter relationship. Both Jenny and Elizabeth face each other and their distinct, but intertwined, histories. They come to grips with their own emotional landscape of exile, recrimination and separation, and in so doing, the two try to navigate their way out of diaspora.
Rating:
Summary: I've Already Been Attracted
Review: Margaret McMullan has invested emotion and authenticity in her story - a story of a family's connection to its past; guarded secrets, religious convictions, resentment and finally understanding. We hear ancestors speaking to their descendants throughout the story, revealing the joys and disappointments of life that ultimately become the inheritance of a mother and daughter. "In My Mother's House" takes the reader on a journey that begins at the family's rich and abundant ancestral home in Vienna at the start of World War II. Along the way, the family's memories of escape and survival, separation and confluence are illuminated for the reader. The richness of a life left behind in Austria is contrasted sharply with the less meaningful, modern-day life of a daughter who is determined to learn of her mother's past so as to make sense of the present. McMullan's historical fiction is compelling as it draws upon the darkest days of the Holocaust, lost religious traditions and the smells and sounds of Vienna in the 1930s - a time and place lost forever.
Rating:
Summary: "In My Mother's House"
Review: Margaret McMullan has invested emotion and authenticity in her story - a story of a family's connection to its past; guarded secrets, religious convictions, resentment and finally understanding. We hear ancestors speaking to their descendants throughout the story, revealing the joys and disappointments of life that ultimately become the inheritance of a mother and daughter. "In My Mother's House" takes the reader on a journey that begins at the family's rich and abundant ancestral home in Vienna at the start of World War II. Along the way, the family's memories of escape and survival, separation and confluence are illuminated for the reader. The richness of a life left behind in Austria is contrasted sharply with the less meaningful, modern-day life of a daughter who is determined to learn of her mother's past so as to make sense of the present. McMullan's historical fiction is compelling as it draws upon the darkest days of the Holocaust, lost religious traditions and the smells and sounds of Vienna in the 1930s - a time and place lost forever.
Rating:
Summary: More than a memoir
Review: This is a story that can transport you to another time and place. The characters and settings come to life through the author's word choice. The ending will leave you satisfied and wanting more from Ms. McMullan.
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