Now Available on Kindle for $8.99!
Click Here to Purchase: eBook of Inter Alia by Ernest Kafka on Kindle
Now Available on Kindle for $6.99!
Click Here to Purchase Survival Skills the eBook
“Inter Alia can be read as a memoir or as a textbook in psychoanalysis with the author as the case study. What bridges the two genres is the author’s ongoing reflection on what made him who he was and his impatient desire to overcome his shortcomings by introspection and through psychoanalytic treatment. It must also be said that it is is a love story. It is not saccharine—no one is larger than life, everyone has flaws—but nonetheless it is a story About love. It is about the author’s love for his parents, his children, and his wife, but also his love for his colleagues, his patients and for the people who helped him along the way. Viewed as the hero’s journey the protagonist moves from a position of alienation, bitterness, and envy towards a position of forgiveness, acceptance, and inner harmony. It is a book about how the author became a better person, and it is a tribute to Dr. Kafka’s achievement that by the close of the book the reader also wants to become a better person and, while
under the influence of the book, believes this is possible. Franz Kafka, a distant relative of the author, wrote that “If the book we are reading does not wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading it for?” This book had that that effect on this reader.”
—PETER DUNN, MD, Faculty Member and Former Director of Clinical Services, New York Psychoanalytic Society & Institute
“Ernest Kafka’s memoir grips the reader’s attention like an adventure story, with its tales of fleeing Austria as Hitler moved in; his father’s aristocratic Jewish orphanage; the family’s comfortable existence in Vienna ending in an encounter with the Gestapo; their protection by a French-resident Jewish aristocrat; and their emigration to New York. The author’s old-fashioned liberal education at Harvard precedes medical school, and training as a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. Marriage to Barbara, an internationally celebrated food writer from a remarkable, wealthy, philanthropic family, leads him to write about aspects of their lives that intersect with the contemporary art world of Frank Stella, Robert Motherwell, Helen Frankenthaler, and the writer delves into his own musical life and gifts. There were children and grandchildren, several houses, travel, starry restaurants, the Jewish jokes and the perpetual table at Elaine’s. But Kafka has another purpose in writing this autobiography: the discussion of psychoanalysis, theoretical, historical and practical, in a context that makes it of equal interest to the professional and to the general reader. This treatment of one man’s life raises questions of importance to all our lives—and is a thumping good read.”
—PAUL LEVY, PHD, journalist, writer, ArtsJournal.com, author of several books on Lytton Strachey, The Official Foodie Handbook, and others
“The economist John Kenneth Galbraith, who knew and admired Dr. Ernest Kafka, once observed that memoirs are mostly written for the pleasure of the author and not the reader. Dr Kafka’s memoir—recounting a life that began as a Jewish child in prewar Vienna, a timely escape from the Nazis, becoming one of the most consequential psychoanalysts since Sigmund Freud, befriending New York’s most prominent artists and writers and being married to a cookbook author whose following rivaled Julia Child’s—is a pleasure to read.”
—AMBASSADOR PETER W GALBRAITH
:Click Here To purchase the print edition of Inter Alia. from IPBooks
Now Available on Kindle for $6.99!
Click Here to Purchase Survival Skills the eBook
“About Survival Skills:
In this stunning memoir, which is also very much a work of history, Anne-Marie Foltz tells the astonishing story of her family’s displacement and survival from World War II Norway. Memory can be a tumultuous, mysterious, often hidden storehouse with no keys to open it. In adulthood Foltz finally found the right questions that unlocked her parents’ theretofore silent and conflicting memories of how and why they left the Nazi Holocaust in Norway.
The parents, Lova and David Abrahamsen, he, a distinguished psychiatrist and author, targeted by the Nazis and she, an extraordinarily courageous woman and mother of two daughters, saved their treasure trove of letters. David fled by ship to America, hoping the family could later reunite. During the winter 1940–1941, Lova, saved her life and the lives of her daughters in an epic trek from Norway to Sweden to Moscow, across the Soviet Union to Japan, by ship to Hawaii and San Francisco.
In their rich surviving letters both Lova and David use the word “unbelievable” to describe their realization that they will once again reunite, that a family can survive the most evil of forces. This story is almost unbelievable, except that we as readers are swept along on a well-documented odyssey that might have been ship-wrecked at any time. At once, a work of retrieval, history, personal revelation, Jewish consciousness, and wonderful storytelling, this book reminds us brilliantly that we are our pasts, as well as the presents and futures we make out of them.
This is a book about loss, but also renewal and the universal meaning of why life matters. Foltz has written a brave and compelling book. ”
—David W. Blight, Sterling Professor of History at Yale University,author of the Pulitzer Prize winning Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom
“This spellbinding author tells the tale of her extraordinary Jewish family’s fraught flight from Norway after the gunfire of the Nazi invasion in 1940. The scarlet thread is the passionately moving love story of her parents, told posthumously through their letters from their struggling, pained separations to their settlement in New York where he becomes a well-known psychoanalytic forensic psychiatrist and writer, she, as a philanthropic supporter of cultural causes and both daughters established and productive.
Anne-Marie Foltz eloquently takes us on her risky discovery mission—later into a first-person present and even into her research to resolve a post war family mystery in contemporary Norway. This is a compelling, well-researched towering story over two generations from Poland and Lithuania to Norway, Sweden and the USA and how all the lives even flourished with richness, yet they continued to bear the searing scars of being hounded by Hitler and anti-Semitism—revealed here graphically, even in Scandinavia.”
—Rosemary H. Balsam, MD, Yale Medical School, winner 2018 Sigourney Award for Psychoanalytic Advancement
“A story of resilience, courage, and love –a story about the cost on the individual of Nazi occupation in a small country beyond the main theaters of war.”
—Bernt Hagtvet, Professor of Political Science, University of Oslo; Adjunct Professor, Bjørknes U. College, Oslo
Anne-Marie Foltz was born in Oslo, Norway. After receiving a MPH and PhD from Yale, she taught at Yale, Wesleyan, and New York Universities, and consulted for health programs on the African continent. She is the author of An Ounce of Prevention: Child Health Politics Under Medicaid.
Survival Skills By Anne-Marie Foltz
Table of Contents
Introduction: Time Future
Part I: Time Past
The First Emigration: Leaving Lithuania and Poland
Lova and David in Norway and Sweden
Anti-Semitism and the rise of Hitler in Germany
Refugees and “Peace in our time”
Part II: Time Present
April 9th,1940
Battle for Southern Norway
The Second Emigration: Leaving German-occupied Norway
Sweden
David in the United States
Leaving Sweden
Journey across Russia, Siberia and Japan
Joliet, Illinois
Kew Gardens, New York
Topeka Kansas and Kew Gardens
Lake Muskoka, Canada
Manhattan
1950: Return to Norway
Part III: Time Future
1971: Return to Norway
1993: David’s 90th birthday
1996: Lova
1997: Abrahamsen Reunion, Trondheim
Norway’s Restitution Debate
The Last Years
Lost to Norway
Epilogue: Was Uncle Heiman a Traitor?
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Click Here to Purchase the Print Edition of Survival Skills from IPBooks